Assigning parent tasks?

[BethMa1]

Our process has been to assign only working tasks (tasks/subtasks with no children) and leave parent tasks unassigned. I noticed some screenshots in Workfront documentation show assignments on parent tasks. Does anyone assign parent tasks? What is the purpose and how do you use it? I can imagine it could possibly help with pared-down dashboards or reports to get a high level view of who is responsible... Beth Massura Assistant Director of Operations, Marketing The University of Chicago Booth School of Business 5807 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637 Phone: 773.702.7598

[EricLu2]

Hi: We never assign work to parent tasks. The reason is that when we do capacity planning, it is very confusing. I have a report that runs that shows me all tasks, with number of children > 0, where there is a role assigned or a person’s name assigned. I just edit the tasks from that report and delete all of them. When WOULD you want to assign resources at the parent level? If you aren’t doing capacity planning and want people to charge time to the parent task level - and not charge time to all of the detailed children tasks. That’s about the only reason I can think of for assigning people to parent tasks. Thanks! Eric

[GregBe1]

Ditto.

[NRYNR]

When it comes to assigning work, we never put assignments on parent tasks. I always refer to parent tasks as "Summary Tasks" and recommend that they never have assignments. However, there is one example where we do assign parent tasks and here's why. We use Workfront's notification feature to send announcements to lists of users. Depending on the project, the users who need to be notified. So, here's the breakdown of the tasks and assignments: Notification Task Is a parent task Has a reminder notification with an email template defined to send to all assignees of the task once the task is marked complete (actually it happens at around 2am ET) Task owner is " I/A Email User", which is a service user with an email address of devnull@. This ensures that no-one gets an assignment email when this task is created. Other assignees of this task are users who need to receive the email notification only (Note: They don't get emails on creation of the task because our environment is configured to only email task owners) Launch Notification Task Is a sub-task of Notification Task Assigned to a project team user. When marked complete, this automatically completes the parent task, which triggers the launch of the notification.

[JasonMa]

Aside from generally not being a best practice, the other issue we have noticed is things get difficult if people put actual time against it. That will really mess up reporting and flexibility with moving and adjusting that task.

[EricLu2]

{{Jason}} So true! We have a quality report that shows all hours charged to parent tasks and we make people correct that and remove the hours from the parent. I had asked that WorkFront add a feature - a system-wide config switch - that allows or disallows time to be charged to tasks with number of children greater than 0. That would make my life a bit easier. Thanks! Eric

[MichaelLa1]

Hi Eric/Narayan, so if someone does log hours to a parent task do you know if that messes up the total hours for that parent task? Meaning do those logged hours overwrite the aggregated sum of hours for the child tasks. Sounds like you both have experience with this so wanted to ask the experts! Thanks!

[EricLu2]

Hi: Interestingly enough, it adds the rolled up hours from the children tasks to the time logged to the parent. The numbers are accurate and nothing is lost. Thanks! Eric

[SierraSt1]

Do you know if there is a way to have the task documents uploaded populate to the parent task also? Sierra Stayberg TrueBlue

[AndrewBe3]

I don't think so. Documents added to any tasks populate on the overall Project documents tab, but they don't 'roll up' or populate on a parent task Andrew Beard - LeapPoint Senior Associate LeapPoint Herndon VA

[VT7432oi]

Do you happen to know if it is a best practice to not assign predecessors to a parent task as well? Generally, PMI best practices lead me to believe I should not leverage summary tasks at all but utilizing the parent tasks for predecessors when there are multiple tasks seems like a useful tool. 

[DagmaraGa]

Re-opening the discussion... Is anyone aware that something has changed within default settings around assigning to the Parent Task? For some reason now when you assigned user, job role etc. to a Parent Task, it doesn't show it on Resource Planner of Grid.. Any ideas why? Dagmara Garwell BAKKAVOR LTD

[CalvinFold]

Like others have said, it's not best practice to assign Parent tasks to anyone and it really makes a mess of reporting financials.

What we did was create a dummy user "Do Not Assign" that we assign to parent tasks on templates to drive this point home.