Finish to Start dependency

Jerry Tutt

I have a question that I am embarrassed to ask.  I thought that I would know the answer with no doubt .  If you build a task that is dependent on the completion of a previous task with a Finish to Start relationship (very standard)  and the previous task ends on April 9th (a Monday) shouldn't the next task (the dependent task) have a start date of April 10th?  I have a task in that situation but, it begins on April 9th.  I can add a lag day and force it to April 10th.  But, that shouldn't be necessary.  Am I correct or am I losing my mind?  I don't have any other dependencies on the task.  

Chris McKay

Hi Jerry,

You're not losing your mind  .

I'm sure it's something simple that we can resolve. What you've described can happen for a few reasons:

• Most Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools assume an 8 hour workday
• As such, the application will try to use the workday as efficiently as possible by bumping tasks up against each other (F-S)
• If you have set any of the predecessor tasks as hours duration (e.g. 4h), part of a day (e.g. 0.5d) or as a milestone (i.e. 0d), then Smartsheet will try to start the successor tasks as early as possible.
• If you've only used a portion of the workday to complete the predecessor tasks, then consequently it will try to start these tasks on the same work day.

This may not be the root cause and maybe "just one of those things".

But I can confirm you're still coming across as relatively sane.

Kind regards,

Chris McKay