About Task Plans

The Laboratory Operations app allows you to use a task plan to organize and manage groups of tasks and samples.

How to Use Task Plans

You can create task plans for managing different types of work. Common types of project you can manage using a task plan include the following:

  • General projects – Lab managers, scientists, and engineers can create task plans to define and manage general projects.

    These task plans identify the individual tasks, their order (if order is important), and the activity or activities on which each task is based, and optionally specific samples that require each task. They can also identify information such as the associated project, cost center, and development phase.

    As a general project task plan evolves, requests for performing each task are generated and each task is eventually assigned to a specific individual (assignee) to do the work.

  • Personal projects – you can create personal task plans and then import selections of your assigned tasks into your personal task plans. You can import selections of tasks from multiple project and metrology task plans into the same personal task plan, and create as many task plans as you like. You cannot, however, import the same task into more than one of your personal task plans.
  • Metrology projects – Equipment administrators and lab managers can create metrology task plans to manage the scheduled maintenance for equipment. They can use the Lab Equipment widget to find equipment that is due for maintenance and then create a task plan for executing the maintenance events.

The Task Planner interface provides a centralized view of a task plan that groups the plan's components under tabs (Samples, Tasks, Results, and Activity Results) and that provides buttons to execute tasks, reassign tasks, create review tasks, requesting re-testing, and so on. The data on these tabs and the actions available vary based on the content of the task plan, the status of the task plan, the status of its tasks, your access rights for the task plan, and your permissions for the actions.