I may just be missing how to do this, but the dependencies feature seems a bit incomplete. If I have 3 subsequent serial tasks that each take a day and the first one slips one day, all of the others should slip by 1 day. Currently it seems like if a serial task slips, it just catches all of the subsequent tasks and just piles them on the new due date. At SpaceX we used Smartsheets quite a bit and the most important feature was the linking tasks with dependencies based on how the serial tasks affect each other. For example, we would make tasks A, B, and C. We would put A to be due on a Monday and then set task B to be done 2 days after task A and task C to be 1 day after task B. This would be shown on the calendar as task A on Monday, task B on Wednesday, and task C on Thursday. If a shipment or something was delayed by 1 week, we would simply push task A to the next Monday and tasks B and C would automatically move to the following Wednesday and Thursday. One benefit of this is that if you are working on a project with many dependencies you can see how different decisions will affect the schedule of the overall team and make decisions such as next day shipping or expedite costs since you can justify them based on how the overall team’s schedule is or isn’t affected. The UI for this was pretty simple, instead of selecting a calendar date on a dependencies, we would just put “task A + 2” or “task A + 2.5” and it would be linked.
5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Auto calculate due date with duration & dependencies
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