Sequence or Subordinate Tasks in Office Project

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You can schedule tasks to occur in sequence or create subtasks by using Office Project tools and store these relationships in Team Foundation. You can also create additional relationships between work items to support your project tracking efforts. You can accomplish this by using the following tools:

  • Use native Office Project tools to sequence tasks or establish tasks and subtask dependencies. When you publish the plan, Team Foundation creates predecessor-successor and parent-child links between the work items. These links are stored both in the project plan and Team Foundation.

  • Use the Team menu Links and Attachments option to create other types of links between tasks. For example, you can create a Related link between two or more tasks and have that relationship stored in Team Foundation.

    Note

    All work items that are linked to tasks selected for import into Office Project, and whose link type corresponds to predecessor-successor or parent-child, appear in the project plan.

For more information about how Team Foundation manages summary tasks, subtasks, and work item dependencies, see Quick Tips and Operational Differences when Tracking Tasks Using Microsoft Project and Team Foundation. 

Required Permissions

To perform these procedures, you must be a member of the Contributors group or have your View work items in this node and your Edit work items in this node permissions set to Allow. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.

  1. In the Office Project plan, switch to any one of the Gantt views or Task Sheet views.

  2. Perform one of the following actions:

    • To create a predecessor-successor link, click the work items that you want to be scheduled in sequence and then click Link Tasks.

    • To create a parent-child link, click the work item that you want to be a subtask, and then click Indent (Indent).

    • To remove a parent-child link, click a subtask, and then click Outdent (Outdent).

    For more information about how to create dependencies or subtasks using the native Office Project features, see the Office Project online Help.

  3. On the Team menu, click Publish to publish the project plan to Team Foundation. 

    For information about publishing, see Publish or Refresh Work Items in Office Project.

    Note

    When you use Office Project to create parent and child tasks, Office Project assigns parent tasks the rollup of hours that are defined for all its child tasks. However, hours that are tracked for both summary and child tasks appear as double-counted in Team Foundation reports that track hours. To address this problem, the rollup of hours is suppressed in the integration of Office Project and Team Foundation Server. The Office Project mapping file attribute, IfSummaryRefreshOnly, suppresses the publication to Team Foundation of the hours that are assigned to summary tasks. You can view the rollup of hours for summary tasks in Office Project but not in Team Foundation. For more information, see The Microsoft Project Field Mapping File.

  4. (Optional) Save the Office Project plan.

    Warning

    You must save the plan if you want to avoid losing information that is saved in Office Project, such as; dependency types, lead and lag times. but is not saved in Team Foundation.

  1. In the Office Project plan, switch to any one of the Gantt views or Task Sheet views.

  2. Click the work item to which you want to add a link.

  3. On the Team menu, click Links and Attachments.

  4. In the View/Edit Work Item Links and Attachments dialog box, click the Links tab.

  5. Click Add.

  6. In the Link type list, click the link type that represents the relationship that you want to create, which will depend on the relationship that the linked work item has to the current work item.

  7. In the Work item IDs box, type one or more work item IDs of the work item or work items that you want to link to the current one.

    Separate multiple IDs with commas.

    You can also click Browse to use the Choose linked work items dialog box to find work items. For more information, see Find Work Items to Link or Import.

  8. Click OK.

  9. In the View/Edit Work Item Links and Attachments dialog box, click Publish, and then click Close.

    The links that you create in this dialog box are saved in Team Foundation Server and not in the Office Project plan.

  10. (Optional) On the Team menu, click Refresh.

    This step causes any predecessor-successor and parent-child links that you added to appear in the Office Project plan.

  11. (Optional) Save the Office Project plan.

    Warning

    You must save the plan if you want to avoid losing information that is saved in Office Project, such as; dependency types, lead and lag times. but is not saved in Team Foundation.

See Also

Tasks

Publish or Refresh Work Items in Office Project

Concepts

Working in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project Connected to Team Foundation Server

Choosing Link Types to Effectively Track Your Project

Scheduling Tasks and Assigning Resources Using Microsoft Project

Other Resources

Quick Tips and Operational Differences when Tracking Tasks Using Microsoft Project and Team Foundation

Creating Relationships Between Work Items and Other Resources