Ron from Cleveland, OH asks: Is it a good practice or bad to link summary tasks?

Answer: In general I don't believe that it's a best practice to link summary tasks within a work breakdown structure (WBS). Here are some of the reasons:

• It's the detail tasks and the milestones that move a schedule ahead and not the summaries. Summaries can’t be tracked and shouldn’t have resources assigned to them. They're not real tasks so much as subtotals and/or titles.
• If you try to track a summary task, it will be right only when there's either zero percent or 100 percent completed on the detail tasks. This occurs because there's a consistent recalculation of the summary task totals by default based on changes to their member tasks.
• Linking summaries can cause errors in the schedule that might be hard to trace.
• Linking summaries means that the entire grouping of tasks must be completed before the next grouping can start...

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