Project Summary Tasks Best Practices

Watch our video on Project Summary Tasks best practices in Microsoft Project:

In Microsoft Project, Summary Tasks are used to logically group tasks into sections or blocks. Summary Tasks can have multiple levels of the subtasks and they can have other summary tasks as subtasks.

There are several recommendations that you need to follow while using Summary Tasks. We identify four recommendations:

           1. If you use the manually scheduled tasks, you need to select your summary task along with your tasks and click on Respect Links that will automatically recalculate all the dates for your tasks.

           2. Never assign resources to summary tasks.

           3. Do not put any constraints on a summary task. If you need to put a constraint, put it on the task. You can use Deadline field in Microsoft Project and use it for milestones.

     4. Do not link summary tasks. Instead, use links between tasks or between tasks and milestones. 

Hope this helps. Please contact us should any questions arise.