Ongoing Tasks

Every organization has overhead work, the "stuff" you do all the time. e.g admin work, meetings, staff support, etc.  It's important to have visibility to the number of hours spent on that kind of work, but creating a new task in your plan every time you do this kind of work would often just be unnecessary maintenance.   

Here's how we model that in our own workspace.  We created a package* called Ongoing Tasks, and within that package we created one task for each category of ongoing work:  

*If you are using access controls and want your restricted members to use ongoing tasks, you'll need to create an ongoing tasks project instead of a package, and then grant restricted members access to that project.  

Now, every time we do this kind of work, we can all log progress against the same task.  Each person can select the task in the plan and right-click > log progress on timesheet.  Or, you can go to My Timesheet, click the Add Task button and locate the task in the pop-up list.  

 Here are some things to note about this model:

• Once you have an ongoing task on your timesheet you might want to pin it to the timesheet.  It will then appear on every future timesheet until you un-pin it. 
• We assign the Ongoing Tasks package and the tasks themselves to a generic virtual member, to reinforce the fact that no one person owns these plan items.  
• The tasks themselves are not estimated. 
• Each person's daily availability setting should be reduced to account for the time you anticipate spending on the ongoing tasks.  This ensures that your availability for the core project work is accurate. 
• In our example, the tasks are not associated to any specific project.  If you need to track ongoing work against a specific project (e.g. if you bill a client for this kind of work), you'll want to create an ongoing work  folder within the project, instead of an independent package.