To-the-Minute Scheduling on Tasks and Projects

Erin Richardson

Scheduling is a key aspect of project management. Effective project management scheduling includes more than just setting the project due date. Rather, for effective planning, a project manager should ensure to define the task and project activities, estimate effort and duration, determine dependencies and monitor everything in real-time. OneDesk offers many options and helpful tools for scheduling and monitoring the progress of your tasks and projects. This article will cover how to go about planning, scheduling, estimating effort, and creating dependencies in OneDesk.

An overview of task and project scheduling capabilities:

  1. Set planned schedules for tasks and projects from their detail panels, from the Gantt chart, or from calendar. You can schedule tasks for a certain day or across several days, and to start and end at a specific time. 
  2. Estimate the effort for tasks based on days, hours, and/or minutes.
  3. Estimate effort for tasks and projects using an agile point system.
  4. Create “scheduling links” between tasks inside the same project, which will connect their start or end times together. These are easy to visualize (and create) on the Gantt chart, but can be created in other ways as well.
  5. Enable constraints to the schedule of tasks (i.e. a task must start on a specific date).
  6. Monitor the planned versus the actual work taken on tasks and projects.

Scheduling tasks and projects

Schedule a task on the detail panel

First, you can schedule a task (or project) directly from the detail panel. The detail panel is where your team works on tasks, including viewing a task description, logging time, and communicating with teammates.

Follow these steps:

  1. From the detail panel click the dates next to “Planned schedule.”
Task detail panel with schedule

2. Enter the planned effort (how much time you expect the task to take). 

3. Set the planned dates by clicking on the planned dates field. Click on a day to set the task for a specific day. Click and drag to specify a task for multiple days.

4. Specify the start and end time. Click the hours next to start time. Click an hour on the clock and this will bring you automatically to set the minutes. Alternatively, you can scroll through the hours using your mouse wheel then click outside of the clock. This action will not automatically bring you into the minutes selection. 

You can select the minutes independently. Like the hours selection, you can click directly on the minutes to select the minutes and this automatically closes the window. Or, you can scroll through the minutes with your mouse wheel, then click outside the clock to save your selection.

  1. Follow the same steps as #4 to set your end times.

Schedule a task on the calendar

The calendar has daily, weekly, and monthly views. Select your view level on the top left side of the calendar. Like other views in OneDesk, your calendar can have custom views. Check out the related articles for more detailed explanations on custom views. In summary, you are able to filter which tasks to view on the calendar. For instance you can filter to only see tasks assigned to a specific team. You can have multiple custom views, each with different options applied, then save your views and switch between them. You can also select to view either the planned or actual schedules or both the planned and actual schedules together on the calendar.

To create a custom view of the calendar select the icon next to ‘My Views’

Calendar functions per view level:

On all view levels (day, week, month) you can:

In day view:

In week view:

In month view:

Schedule a task on the Gantt chart

The Gantt chart can be scaled to the: minute, hour, day, week, month, quarter, and year. To scale, select the scale option on the left top side of the Gantt chart or hold Ctrl and scroll with your mouse wheel. 

Like other views in OneDesk you can filter or group your Gantt view with custom views. For instance, group by team or filter the view to a specific project.

On the Gantt the blue bars represent the planned schedule. The green bars represent the actual progress of the task. This feature allows your team to dynamically monitor the progress of tasks and projects in relation to your plans. You will also notice that as you plan tasks, the bars of your projects and folders get darker blue, representing more tasks scheduled at the same time.

Schedule links on the Gantt chart

You can link together tasks via finish-to-start, start-to-start and finish-to-finish links. OneDesk will make use of these links to schedule your tasks in the shortest project possible.

You can create these links by dragging and dropping from (and to) the circles that appear when you hover or select the task bars. You can remove the constraints on the Gantt by clicking on the constraint lock icon or the linking arrow.

Schedule finish-to-start in Tree or Flat view

Since the finish-to-start link is the most common choice, there is a menu option in the Tree view that lets you link together a string of these with one action. Just multi-select the tasks you wish to link, click the actions menu and select “Schedule Items Finish to Start”. You can also break these links by selecting “Remove Finish to Start link on Items”

Setting date constraints

By default, OneDesk uses the very loose constraint of “Start No Earlier Than” and chooses today’s date or the project’s start date. There are other kinds of constraint that you can pick:

You can set a date constraint for a task in the Task Planned Values. To bring up the Task Planned Values, click the task to bring up the detail panel and click the dates next to “Planned schedule, as you would for scheduling from the task detail panel. (Note: from Tools on the top panel select “Dock detail panels on right” to open the detail panel without exiting the Gantt chart).

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