Flexible dependencies

laymanp

In our use case, we have dependent tasks that may start days/weeks/months after the preceding task, but when I manually set a start date that's not the immediately following date, it breaks the dependency. While I know that I can manually set lag times to accomplish my goal, this requires extra work to dial in the correct date, and this affects up to 25% of my tasks. If this functionality, changing start dates doesn't break dependencies, it would be a great benefit to me. Thank you.

Tim Starkey

Agreed. Our templates have all the dependencies built in. Sometimes someone just wants to show a task starting a couple days later, and it has no impact on the schedule. The ability to shift out within the available float would be great. Maybe instead of the pop-up saying you are about to break dependencies, have it give you the option:

This task has a dependency. You can either:

• Break the dependency
• Keep the dependency by adding lag

If user selects lag, it automatically adds the appropriate lag amount based on the date selected.

To pile on... if the date selected DID impact downstream tasks, a second pop-up would be nice if it said something like: "The date you have entered will push the project end date (milestone, downstream tasks, etc) out by 23 days. Please confirm you would like to continue." Reason being, we often view tasks in rolled up reports and do not see the big picture.