Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
T3.2 'Hyperparameter tuning' contributes to deliverable D3.1 and milestone MS3, with partners P1 (8 PM) and P2 (4 PM).
- Is an instance
A consortium reviews progress on each task at the bi-monthly executive board meeting.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A whole work package is not a task.
- Not an instance
An internal subtask not listed in Annex 1 is not a task in the funder-reported sense.
Editorial commentary
In Horizon Europe, a task is the operational unit directly below a work package: work package WP3 is broken into tasks T3.1, T3.2, and so on, each with a short narrative description, the partners contributing effort, their person-month allocation, and a start/end window measured in project months. Tasks are defined in Part B of the Horizon Europe Application Form and, once funded, in Annex 1 of the Grant Agreement — they are formally part of what the Commission approved and what a beneficiary is contractually committed to carrying out.
Task vs. subtask
Tasks are the smallest unit the European Commission actually tracks. Consortia routinely break tasks down further into subtasks for internal management, but that breakdown is not reported — the Commission’s own review, at each periodic report, works at task and work-package level, checking task progress against the deliverables and milestones the task feeds.
Task leads and contributing partners
Each task normally has one lead partner, responsible for coordinating the task and reporting its status to the work-package leader, plus a list of contributing partners each with their own person-month allocation. A task can span the full duration of its work package or cover only part of it, and its end typically aligns with completion of the deliverable or milestone it feeds — which is why task timing, deliverable due dates, and milestone dates are planned together, rather than independently, in the Application Form’s Gantt chart.
Reporting and staffing
Task assignment matters at proposal stage, because person-month allocations per task per partner determine how the requested EU contribution is justified, and it matters through execution, because task progress is tracked by the consortium’s own governance — typically an executive or steering board — even though the Commission’s periodic report format itself reports at work-package level. A task that stalls threatens the deliverables and milestones downstream of it, which is why coordinators track task status internally more granularly than the Commission requires.
Also known as
Project task · Sub-activity
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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