I tried to search a lot before posting this, but couldn’t find anything that matched exactly what I’m looking for.
In MS project and other Gantt tools, it’s an industry standard to be able to set dependencies with lags. For example, task B can’t start until two days after A is done (as opposed to the default finish/start dependency where task B starts immediately when task A is done). Or, in the case of a Start/Start dependency I want task B to start 3 days after task A starts. Or even a negative lag such as task B is dependent on task A but can start 4 days BEFORE task A is done.
I’ve read some help topics that mention Flowsana might be the only way to do this? But I find it hard to believe that Asana doesn’t have this feature inherently, so before we go down the path of Flowsana I wanted to make sure. Flowsana does seem to have other great features though.
Lag Time: This is a number of days, weeks, or months and can be applied to a dependent task. It defines the amount of time that Flowsana should allow between the Due Date or Completion Date of a dependency task and the Start Date of the dependent task which contains the lag time. It’s also used to calculate a lag time between a project’s start date and the start date of tasks in that project (see Project Rules below). You can specify a negative lag time (i.e. a lag time preceded by a minus sign), like -4 or -1w, to indicate that you want the dependent task to begin prior to the due date of its dependency task.
I’ve also faced situations with clients where they specifically ask about lag options. In project management use cases, this is something teams often rely on, especially when they are looking to migrate from Microsoft Project (MPP) to Asana.
This is where the conversation can become a little challenging, because clients expect the same level of dependency and scheduling flexibility they had in MPP. Although this functionality is available through Flowasana, it comes with an additional cost, which can make the overall proposition slightly more difficult.