Task Types

Overview

Every task can be assigned a specific task type to help you more easily visualize the work breakdown structure of a project and categorize the unique components of the task. They also help with resourcing needs and determining which team members should be assigned to which tasks.
The task types are:

• Tasks—Items that need to be completed.
• Deliverables—Things that need to be produced (e.g. documents).
• Milestones—Project deadlines, marking the completion of a phase or stage of a project.
• Issues—Bugs or items that need to be resolved.

Task types can be set in the Task Tracker, Gantt Chart, or Task side panel.

Once your task types are assigned, you can specify which types your account members can track time against via the Track Time and Expense Against setting. For example, if you select Tasks and Milestones as seen in the image below, users will only be able to track time and expenses against those specific task types.

To learn more about where you can manage tasks and their types, see the Tasks Overview article.

Tasks

Tasks are items that need to be completed in order to complete the project. They are the building blocks of projects and help team members track the progress of the work, communicate needs, and show which items still need to be completed.

Deliverables

A deliverable is an item that needs to be produced before the project can move onto the next stage or be completed. Deliverables will vary depending on your project's unique components and can be things such as documents, reports, designs, etc.

For example, the deliverable task shown below is for a training video. This video must be completed before the project can move onto the next milestone, which is the release of a new Scheduling feature in the company’s application.

Milestones

A milestone marks the completion of a phase in your project timeline or the project itself. You can look at it as a deadline where all required deliverables, tasks, and any applicable issues must be completed or delivered. You can have multiple milestone tasks within a single project.

All milestone tasks are highlighted in gray in the Task Tracker to help you quickly locate them and get an overview of how many remaining milestones the project has.

Milestone Weighting

You can assign weighting to milestones to define percentages of completion at different stages of the project. Milestone weighting is especially helpful for projects where payments are tied directly to achieving certain milestones during the project lifecycle.

To learn more, see the Milestone Weighting article.

Issues

Issues are action items that weren’t part of the original project plan, but impact the duration of a project. An issue may be a software bug, an addition to scope that needs to be discussed, a ticket, or a request.

Creating an Issue 

Since issues are visible to service providers and Clients, they are a valuable tool for managing any client feedback or capturing client requests. After issues are created, you can turn them into an action item by changing their type into a task or deliverable.

If you’re reporting a bug or something that needs to be fixed, it’s helpful to be descriptive about the problem you’re experiencing and how your experience is different than what you expected. Here’s an example format:

• Issue Title—A brief description of the problem.
• Steps to Reproduce—The order of actions that led you to the problem.
• Expected Behavior—How you think it should work.
• Actual Behavior—How it actually worked.