Unless you are only using Outlook 2007 to manage your own personal projects, there will frequently be times when you need to assign or transfer project tasks to another person or team. Making these assignments through the task system can help a great deal in keeping track of all the information for the task, including the progress that has been made and how much work any one person or team has on their plate.
In earlier articles of this series, we created a new folder and several sample tasks to demonstrate how Outlook could be used as a project management tool. We will refer back to some of those segments in the instructions below.
Step 1: Open the task list that contains your project items.
Step 2: Find the project task that you want to assign to another person or team. Double-click on that item to open the task in a new window. (Click the image below for a larger view.)
Step 3: Make sure that the Task tab on the Outlook ribbon has been selected. Click on the Assign Task button located in the Manage Task portion of the ribbon.
Step 4: Fill in the email addresses of the parties to whom you are assigning the task. You can also update other task information in this window and include additional remarks in the note section that will appear in the recipients’ email message.
Step 5: When you have finished entering the information, click the Send button. The task will now show up as assigned in the main window of the project task list.
Note: Outlook 2007 will not allow you to assign a task to yourself using this method. By default, a newly created task will automatically be considered to belong to you. If you need to transfer an assignment that was previously made to another person back to yourself, click on the Cancel Assignment button that appears in the main window for the task.
In Part 6 of this series, we’ll show how you can create and send status reports directly from your project task list.