Dividing a task into subtasks: an example

We return to our example task “Expert interviews” in the project “Substitution of the com­mission settlement system”. You as the requestor of this task would like to distribute the interviews to the project members foreseen as contractors according to their specific quali­fi­ca­tion. You select  File    New    Multiple Subtasks  and define four subtasks “Interview Dr. Trevor”, “Interview Mr. Howard” etc., that you assign to suitable project members as contractors. Du­ra­tion and deadline are taken over from the main task.

After creation of the subtasks you start the “Expert interviews” task. This also starts all the subtasks automatically. By dividing the task into subtasks, the contractors of “Expert interviews” have an overview of who is responsible for the different interviews and whether and when they were actually carried out. The minutes of the different interviews are uploaded as documents to the main task and have yet to be integrated into the output document of the main task.

The creation of subtasks as single tasks also includes the definition of input and output data. When you specify the data fields of a subtask you always have the possibility to link the sub­task to other tasks via a suitable definition of the input and output data – thus forming a workflow. Therefore we have postponed the creation of single tasks to the next section.