Assigning Resources To Summary Level Tasks

[Jaimee]

Using MS Project Pro 2003 We are attempting to assign Enterprise resources at
summary level tasks, thus leaving the detail tasks unassigned. When the
resources report their completed work at the summary level will Project
automatically update the % complete for the subsequent detail tasks?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Jaimee --

I am teaching a Microsoft Project 2007 Foundations class right now in
Sacramento. My students and I looked at your question together, and one of
my students (Konstantin Popov) says, "No, the summary task is a rollup. The
information does NOT roll down from the summary task." And he, being one of
my brilliant students, is absolutely right. I think it's time to ditch
assigning resources to summary tasks, and time to start assigining them to
detail tasks instead. Hope this helps.

 

[unL33T]

I have the opposite problem. We are using Project 2003 at work (I do not have a choice to use a newer version, although they are switching to 2007 in the near future). We assign tasks to the detail tasks but then they are not listed in the summary task. This makes it so that if we do a split view with resource usage at the top of the window and the Gantt at the bottom, the summary tasks are not listed in the Gantt chart. This makes it difficult for us to see what project the detail tasks are for since the detail tasks are the same for every project. The summary task contains the project name.

We figured out that we can make the summary task display by assigning the resource to it and then changing the units of that resource to 0% so we do not get over work conflicts but this means we have to do it all manually. Since the summary task encompases all the detailed sub tasks, it should show the resources for the detail tasks as also being part of the summary task but it does not. Is there a way I can set this up to happen automatically?

Thanks!