Gantt moves a Monday meeting to Friday because of Predecessor setting

Troy G. Biv

I have a task for a project that should be completed on Friday. The following Monday, I have a milestone (meeting) to review that task (proposal),

 

The completion of the task on Friday is the predecessor for the milestone on Monday, but as soon as I set that predecessor, the milestone is moved to Friday too.

 

I can't figure out how to make this represent the actual timeline of events.

Troy G. Biv

I was looking at Gantt.com to make sure I was using predecessors correctly, and sure enough there's a picture showing exactly what I want (see attached).

 

How can I do this in Smartsheet?

 

 

Troy G. Biv

I went in and edited the predecessor settings. It's set as Finish-to-Start. If I add two days off lag, the meeting moves to Wednesday.

 

When I first set the predecessor, it shows correctly, with the arrow line running through the weekend and the meeting on Monday, but then, less than a second later, it redraws itself with the meeting on Friday.

Tim Meeks

Troy,

 

can you do a screen shot of these tasks.  That would help.

 

Is your milestone(the meeting) set to 0 duration or to a duration like 1 day?  Seting it to 0 duration would make it move to Friday.

 

Tim

Troy G. Biv

It's set to zero duration because it's a meeting.

 

What I did was change the lag to 4h and that moved the milestone to the middle of the day on Monday. So that's solved, but I'm frustrated that Smartsheet ignores the date that I've put in as the start date for a milestone, and just changes it based on the end of the predecessor.

Tim Meeks

I understand. MS Project does the same if the task is set to Autoschedule.(see below)

MS Project assumes an ASAP constraint and it's been my experience Smarthsheet does the same.  Thus, the dependency task assumes it should occur immediately following it's predecessor.  The only way I know to do this is add a lag as you did or remove the predecessor dependency.  I'm not aware of functionality within Smartsheet to either manually schedule tasks or an "As Late As Possible" setting.

 

Keep in mind that even though Smartsheet does this that's one of the advantages of Smartshet is that it is less complicated and easier to use than MS Project.  But to me, Smartsheet is a much better alternative.

 

 

MS project autoschedule constraints

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/How-scheduling-works-in-Project-5d4f5981-4e9f-4e8e-a699-2ef2a419252f

".....a task with an As Soon As Possible (ASAP) constraint and a finish-to-start dependency will be scheduled as soon as the predecessor task finishes. By default, all tasks in a project that is scheduled from the start date have the ASAP constraint applied. Likewise, by default, all tasks in a project that is scheduled from the finish date have the As Late As Possible (ALAP) constraint applied."

 

Travis

Troy - milestones have a 0 day duration, so Friday + 0 days = Friday.

 

If you want your milestone to occur one workday after the proceeding task, add a 1 day lag day by adding "+ 1" after the predecessor value.