Phases and Tasks in the Work Breakdown Structure
When you plan your work breakdown structure, you can decide whether or not to use phases and tasks. A phase is a defined and managed segment of a project. A task is a defined and managed segment of a phase.
Depending on your business goals, you may want to subdivide a project using delimiters, in addition to using phases or phases and tasks, or instead of using multiple WBS levels.
If you want to track labor costs, you can also use labor codes.
Phase numbers can be up to seven characters, including one user-defined delimiter. Most firms are satisfied with a simple three-character code. As long as you use the same number of characters from project to project, your phase numbers do not need to be consistent. For example, one project can have phase numbers 100, 200, and 300 while another has phases 001, 002, and 003. However, it may be helpful to determine a numbering method before you begin to create phases.
Task numbers can be up to seven characters, including one user-defined delimiter. Most firms are satisfied with a simple three-character code. As long as you use the same number of characters from project to project and phase to phase, your task numbers do not need to be consistent. For example, one phase can have task numbers 001, 002, and 003 while another has tasks A01, A02, and A03. However, it may be helpful to determine a numbering method before you begin to create tasks.
Reasons to Use Phases and Tasks
| Business Goal | How to Use Phases or Tasks |
|---|---|
| Project manager wants two levels of detail | If a project manager wants to see two levels of detail for labor and expenses within a contract, you can use phases and tasks. The main segments would be represented by phases, and tasks would represent the specific services within each segment. |
| Marketing professional wants to market a segment of a project | If a marketing professional wants to market a segment of a project, such as the parking garage of a larger building, you can set up phases to represent parts of the building. This allows the marketing professional to create proposals using the information on the specific segment he or she wants to showcase. |
| Track project data for internal reporting only | Projects are usually created for external reporting purposes (for example, to generate bills). If you have a need for internal reporting in addition to external reporting, you could create phases, or phases and tasks.
For example, if you want to track how much work a particular organization does on a project, but you don't want this information to appear on the client's invoice, you can create phases to represent organizations. Vision Billing Terms allow you to display all project detail under the heading of the main project, thereby hiding the phases from the client. If you have no internal need to divide a project into parts, but do have an external need, you can use delimiters to divide the project into sub-projects. You can then create individual invoices for sub-projects (created using delimiters. You cannot bill phases and tasks separately. |
| Budget a component of a project separately | If you set up multiple levels of WBS, you can use the Project Budget Worksheet to budget components separately. |
| Flexible reporting | Vision's project-related reports can show each project broken out by phase or phase and task.
Phase number — The phase number fits between the project number and the task number in the standard sorting hierarchy of Vision reports. Task number — The task number fits between the phase number and the labor code in the standard sorting hierarchy of Vision reports. |