Can You Hide Project Tasks In The Planning Console?

[Casey3]

We are currently working on configuring project (and undoing customizations) in our environment to make the project module more useful to our PMO team and more supportable on our end. A question that was brought up was if a task was no longer needed, can it be removed from the planning console? Short of deleting the task (which we won't do) I haven't really found any information.

In the default states, closed skipped sticks out to me as the obvious choice for a task that is no longer needed, but that task will still appear in the planning console. I guess the real question, other than whether or not the tasks can be hidden, is what are some reasons not to hide tasks that are closed skipped? Our team here believes that if the task is no longer needed, it shouldn't be shown in the planning console because no work will be performed on the task and therefore doesn't affect the project timeline.

So if you have a recommendation as to why we should keep the tasks in the planning console or how we could hide those tasks, I'm all ears!

[Uncle Rob · Accepted solution]

The reason you don't hide tasks is that the whole idea of a Project Task is its interaction and constraint of other Project Tasks.

Basically, if I'm using constraints and an automatically calculated Project WBS, then ServiceNow simply doesn't care how much I think the task isn't needed.  Its obeying its mechanical rules.  Here's three scenarios for you...

"I'm a PM and this task we're days into isn't needed anymore"
- Close the Project Task conventionally.  If we've done work on it, that's actual work.  The task just completed earlier than expected (and who cares why)

"I'm a PM and I know this task (which hasn't been worked) will never be worked"
- remove any relationships and delete the project task.  What good is it for historic purposes if I'm convinced enough it has and never will have value on the wbs?

I guess another way to spin this is, "why do you think deleting project tasks is a bad idea"?

[Casey3]

Thanks for that info Robert. As a general rule, we don't allow users to delete records. Mostly because of accidental deletions. We'd rather close/cancel a ticket that's not going to be used, rather than worry about the inevitable accidental deletions of potentially important data. As administrators, we also don't want to get hit up all the time to delete tasks.

I think what this comes down to is that what you said about relationships and constraints. As long as there aren't any relationships or constraints on the task, it doesn't affect the rest of the project. So who cares? Well, the project manager might, but since it doesn't actually affect the project it's hard to justify creating a "fix" for this.

[Uncle Rob]

Hey Casey,

Thanks for the feedback.  I think your rule-of-thumb is a good one, just that Project's uniqueness supersedes it.  You DEFINITELY don't want task deletion where actual work has been done, but conventional close is suitable there.  Future tasks are deleted *all the time* in both ServiceNow and other PM tools.  Only thing you could watch out for is related resource plans, cost plans, etc.