How can work be automatically rescheduled when finish dates are missed?

TET

There doesn't seem to be any native functionality to reschedule remaining work when planned finish dates are missed - a MAJOR flaw if true. Am I missing something or does anyone know of a work-around?

Paul Newcome

Can you provide screenshots of your existing sheet and explain more about how you would expect it to work?

TET

The first task in red had an end date of 1/25 (in the past), but it didn't get done. Being on the critical path, the delay will delay several other tasks. To plan for those downstream delays, I need to be able to reset future task timing to reflect this delay. In MS Project and several other scheduling tools, there is a function to reset incomplete tasks based on 'today' which would push all the subsequent tasks out accordingly. Appreciate any thoughts!

Paul Newcome

Have you tried adjusting the end date for the task that fell behind schedule?

TET

Yeah that's the work around, but that change only hits the critical path at that moment in time. If there are other tasks that haven't been done because they have slack time, it wont schedule them into the future--which renders the gantt chart a bit unreliable. That creates a situation where the report shows stuff scheduled to start in the past, which in turn means that we have no real-world visibility (no one believes a schedule with something scheduled in the past) until it actually becomes a critical path task. To use the same work-around on all tasks is not just tedious and prone for error, it exaggerates the actual durations.

Paul Newcome

That's where predecessors come into play. If you have your predecessors set up, it should push anything flowing down the line.

I also understand the concern about duration, but that's where the baseline feature comes into play. You can see the initially projected vs the actual. This way if a duration seems longer than it should, you can confirm that it was not originally that way when it was baselined but that (for whatever reason) it got extended during the actual project.

TET

Thanks for your help, Paul. It's a little clunky and doesn't really help the actual duration issue for completed activities, but it seems to work best if I create a Reset Schedule task in Row 1 and make the project dependent on that. Completed tasks durations have to be set to zero when marked complete--that's the downside--but can be somewhat address by a workflow that records actual dates in new columns when marked complete, prior to changing durations to zero. Then when I change the Reset date, all incomplete activities seem to reset to the future. Not ideal but maybe it'll work. I've seen some other posts on this topic, so hopefully others can use this.