Before continuing, I wanted to mention that Today, May 12, Office 2010 formally Launches and will be readily available for any organization to download!  Next month, Microsoft will launch Office for the general public.

In this fifth video in my 10-part Adapting series, you will learn about a very cool new feature called Inactive Tasks.  The concept behind Inactive Tasks is essentially that you have a task which can basically be taken out of the plan but still exist in the schedule.  It will look like this when inactive and even if you have predecessor/successor links to it, Project will ignore it.

I bet some people will come up with real interesting uses for Inactive tasks, but here are the two popular ones I’m sure will be used commonly:

1. Scope Management – Very often we delete tasks from our plan because we changed scope or any number of other reasons.  Then, as often is the case, they suddenly need to be done again.  Instead of deleting the tasks, you can leave them in your schedule and just “Inactivate” them.
2. Risk Mitigation – If you are tracking risks that are likely to happen, why not plan for them in your schedule and keep them Inactive?  If the risk occurs, you simple Activate these tasks and incorporate them into your current WBS structure.  This could very likely be a nice fix for a common problem where Project Managers keep two completely separate project plans with and without more tasks to account for project risk.

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UPDATE: For some reason YouTube shrunk the screens on this video.   Click on the video and watch it in full-screen directly from YouTube for best results.

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