Our managers want to have a list of their open projects, and understand what "stage" those projects are in. The stages are:
- Stage 1: includes a set of tasks between project has been sold in and when the study is sent to the field.
- Stage 2: occurs once the study comes back from the field and includes tasks to analyze the data and create the deliverable
- Stage 3: happens once the project has been delivered, and includes Q&A
- There are also meetings and other "execution" tasks that occur throughout the project. We want to plan for those hours in total, but the work could happen at any stage of the project duration.
*note, a study can be out in the field for several weeks, at which point our team members are working on other projects.
How should we set up our task list? Should stage 1 tasks be sub-tasks under a milestone? Or should we use Buckets?
The start date of stages 2 and stage 3 may need to be moved throughout the course of the project because we are waiting on inputs from the client. What scheduling mode should we use? Can we manually adjust those task start dates?
Thanks!