A special type of task is the Summary Task.
A Summary Task is useful for displaying the project the way upper management
sees it, minus
the details and answers the question "how long will the whole thing take?"
A Summary Task is a task that acts to show the total duration of a group
of "sub- tasks".
It's displayed as a summary bar.
Summary Bar
As in MindManager, where
you can display many levels of branches, in the Gantt, you can have
many levels of projects and subprojects.
Summary task as shown in Tree Pane
Any "higher level"
of tasks is shown as a summary task with a black, dull, color- less
bar...perhaps it's a metaphor for "we like our information black and white"
What are they good for?
If you're running
5 different projects simultaneously and have to present your current status
to the executive committee, you can collapse the branch so that sub-tasks are not shown,
and simply show a graph with the Summary Tasks.
That way, they don't
need to know the details as to what you expect will cause which action
to be delayed, they can just see the overview of "what's scheduled" or... "what's occurred".
Tip: You
can set the % done on a Summary Task as you see fit, according to your own
metrics.
