Split task or group?
 

Hi Guys!

I'd love to get an advice from those with more PM skills under the belt :-)

What would be the benefit of splitting a task as oppose to creating a group and breaking the task in chunks?

I can see that there is no way of assigning particular chunk to a resource at the moment (please, correct me if I'm wrong) and this looks a bit of a problem if one has more than one resource working on the task.

Would you split tasks often and, if you do, how do you approach leveling?

Guys, anyone?

What I can see is that splitting a task with two resources assigned to it is not giving me flexibility to assign first half of the split task to resource 1 and the second one to resource 2. If I want resource 2 to work on something else while resource 1 does the first half of the split task and resource 1 working on something else when resource 2 starts on the second half, it prevents leveling from doing fine job.
Meanwhile a group with two tasks in it, works out just fine.

I was wondering in which case split task is better than a group. I see people were asking for split task feature to be added, but maybe they don't assign a split task to more than one resource and it works fine then?

Am I having a special case or asking a weird question? :-)

Well, my take on this is that a split task is appropriate when there is nothing substantively different about the last half of the task relative to the first. It's just a handy way to have all resources suspend work on a given task, to resume later.

If there is anything about the second half of the task that's no effectively equal to the first, what you really have is two related tasks. The second half, for example, can't have a new prerequisite or any difference in assignments. All it should be is "effort stopped", "effort resumed on <date>".


-Tom