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Lesson 3: Assigning task durations

In this lesson, you will learn how to assign estimated durations to the tasks in your project. You can only assign durations to tasks. Iteration durations are aggregated from their constituent tasks, and milestones are of zero duration.
This task is performed in the WBS Schedule Gantt viewlet. Navigate to or add the WBS Schedule Gantt viewlet to your view.

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When you assign durations to tasks, the end dates of the tasks are calculated based on the available working days in the project calendar. For example, in the current state of your project, all tasks are scheduled to start from the same date, which is the project start date. Consider a task in your project where the start date is Friday, November 20, 2009, and all Saturdays and Sundays are weekly holidays in the project calendar. Assign a duration of three days to the task. The End date will be displayed as Tuesday, 24 November, 2009.

To assign task durations:

  1. In the WBS tree, expand the "Develop Work Management module" project.
  2. In the WBS Schedule Gantt viewlet, click the task "Create vision and scope document". In the Duration cell, enter the duration as 2 days.
  3. Click the "Create test plan" task, and enter the Duration as 1 day.
  4. Assign durations to all the project tasks as indicated in the following table:
    Table 1. Task durations
    Name Duration (days)
    Create vision and scope document 2
    Create test plan 1
    Set up infrastructure 2
    Develop project creation framework 5
    Run unit tests 3
    Develop scheduling algorithm 5
    Implement scheduling algorithm 2
    Run unit tests for scheduling algorithm 3
    Integrate project creation and scheduling 2
    Run unit tests for integration 2
    System test for project creation and scheduling 3
    Remember: You do not have to assign durations to milestones.
    Note: The default constraint for all the tasks is 'As soon as possible'. We will not change the constraint for this tutorial.
  5. Click Save.
Look at the end dates for each of these tasks. You will see the end dates are changed to accommodate the assigned durations. Iteration durations and end dates are aggregated from the constituent tasks. The project end date and duration is also rolled up from the tasks - the project duration is the duration of the longest task (5 days), and the end date of the task is the end date of the last task.

Notice that the project schedule is still not realistic, because all of the tasks are scheduled to start on the same date, despite tasks that must obviously be completed in sequence. Also, the project duration is only 5 days, but the tasks will evidently take longer to complete. These issues will be addressed in the next lesson, where you will assign dependencies to tasks.

Lesson checkpoint

In this lesson, you learned about the following concepts:
  • Durations and the project elements that they are applicable to
  • How to assign durations to project tasks

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