Tasks are the basic building blocks in any project. Sometimes referred to as activities or work packages, tasks describe the work that needs to be done to complete your project. Various types of tasks exist, including summary tasks, subtasks, and milestones.
Summary Tasks
Summary tasks help you organize groups of closely related tasks using hierarchy (an outline). Summary tasks broadly describe the work to be done in a specific part of a project but don’t provide sufficient detail to serve as instructions. Instead, resources are assigned to subtasks indented below a summary task.
Milestones
A milestone represents a significant event or date in a project like the completion of a phase or a deadline that must be met. Typically, no work is associated with the milestone itself - they are assigned a duration of zero.
A Quick Example
Let’s look at an example. In the project at the top of the page, each row in the Entry table contains a task. “Insider’s Guide to Business Travel” is a special type of task. It’s the project summary task – it’s 82 days in duration and it represents the entire project.
“Research Phase” in row two is a summary task. It represents the portion of the project that will be spent researching topics for the book. The tasks contained in Research Phase, rows three through five, provide a more detailed account of the work to be done. Research phase culminates in a milestone (row six), indicating that all of the work in that part of the project is complete.