A task is an PPM Pro entity that is essential to accurate and efficient project planning. A project is typically comprised of one or more tasks, referred to as a "task plan" or "work breakdown structure" (WBS). Tasks are very flexible and can be used in different ways, depending on your organization's planning methodology(ies). Tasks are executable actions that:
For the purposes of this documentation, tasks used in support of traditional waterfall (linear/sequential) methodologies are referred to as "regular" tasks, or just tasks. Tasks used in support of iterative work methodologies are referred to as IW tasks.
In the WBS for traditional waterfall methodologies supported by regular tasks, Summary tasks and their children are tightly coupled - child tasks inherit certain properties of the Summary task such as billing type and mode (manual or automatic); all parent task dates, not just Summary task dates, are rolled up from the child tasks. In addition, you can associate roles and estimates for what what will be necessary to complete the tasks, assign one or more owners to a single task, and schedule one or more resources to tasks to track progress (time), and hours to complete (HTC).
For more information see:
Iterative work (IW) tasks, on the other hand, can be completely divorced from interacting with summary/parent tasks by virtue of removing the requirement to use start dates, target dates, or duration. Dependencies and constraints are still honored.
For more information see:
There is a set of features that apply to both regular and IW tasks.
Establishing time tracking rules and tracking time
Setting up capitalized costs
Building a adhering to dependencies and constraints,
Calculating project and task % complete - cant use Duration and actual hours (because it uses HTC
Note for task owners: Some fields on the task Details tab directly affect other tasks or the parent project. Default task owner permissions will exclude edit permissions on the following fields. In order to edit these fields, users need Project > Edit > Tasks permission and possibly Project > Edit > Detail (if the parent project needs to be updated based on an edit to one of the fields below):
For best results, we recommend limiting the number of tasks per project to 1000. Overall performance depends on the system in general, including the number of projects, number of concurrent users, number of concurrent dashboards being run, and so on. We do recommend fewer rather than more tasks, but it is up to the customer given their needs.
See Tasks: Out of the Box Fields for the list of all standard fields and their definitions. You administrator has determined which fields are used with any particular task - so you may not see all the standard fields on your tasks.