Tasks

Tasks are used to divide up your project into different levels as you wish. For example, a Task can have sub-tasks which might represent the different departments or locations in your project.

In the example in Outline of the Solver user interface, the project: 'Grand Hotel week 24', contains a Task called 'Weekly Roster' which in turn contains 2 sub-tasks representing two departments within the project: 'Catering' and 'Services'. Each of these contain further sub-tasks for the different divisions within each department e.g. 'Restaurant', Kitchen' and 'Bar' divisions within the 'Catering' department.

The lowest tier within the project is the different Jobs within a Task or sub-task. These are represented by small boxes with a coloured (grey) header. See Jobs for more details.

The outermost box represents the entire project and differs from its sub-tasks. See Project for more details.

You can zoom in on a particular Task by clicking on its header. The Task is maximised within its parent Task. In the following example, the 'Restaurant' Task has been maximised within its parent Task 'Catering'.

Click on the header of the zoomed Task to reset its size.

Other Tasks in the project are minimized at the bottom of the user interface and can be maximised in the same way.

Menu options for Tasks

When you right-click in an empty area of a Task five options are available:

Note: there are different menu options in Edit mode, see Modify a Task for details.

• Remove employees from all jobs — allows you to clear the selected Task by dropping Employees from its Jobs
   

• Lock all employee assignments — this allows you to temporarily lock the Task so that any Employees assignments will not be changed if you Auto-solve your project. See Assign employees and Auto-solve a project for more details
   

• Unlock all employee assignments — this allows the Rostering Auto-solve function to override any Employee assignments you may have made manually
   

• Send availability request messages to possible employees this allows you to send a pre-defined availability message, via email or SMS, to the Employees that the Solver has identified as being available to work. To send availability messages you will need to have the Mitrefinch Messaging Service set up outside of Rostering. See Sending availability messages for more details
   

• Notification recipients — this allows you to define users (recipients) who can receive email notifications if a problem is detected with the Task. Notification recipients can also be defined for individual Jobs or for the entire project. This is described in more detail in Notification recipients
   

• Send confirmation messages to allocated employees — this option is only displayed when the Rostering Allocator has been run on the project see The Rostering Allocator for more details. It allows the Solver to send messages to the Employees confirming that they have been allocated to particular Jobs. See Send allocation confirmation message

Note: Selecting one of these options for a Task will apply it to all of its sub-tasks.