Additional Duration Options

John Sauber

It would be very helpful to have duration codes to have the duration snap to, say, “Finish next Thursday,” or “Start 5 Fridays from Finish.” These durations might look something like “F1Th” or “S5F”. Naturally, the “Start X Fridays from Finish” type of duration only applies to certain predecessors styles, such as “Start/Finish to Finish.”

 

This would make the actual duration of a task dynamic, referring to it's start or end date, which can often be defined (and more importantly here, redefinied) by a predecessor task that has no vision of its successor task.

 

This would be particularly helpful for tasks that only start and/or end on certain days of the week, such as a pickup / delivery run that only happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Or, perhaps, a rural location that only gets delivery service on a certain day of the week.

 

Does this sound nice to anyone else?

 

We get around this now by doing a generic and complicated set of calculations surrounding a task's start date to determine what date it "should" end on. We then infer a duration based on the current start date and the "should-be" end on date. This "suggested duration" column is listed in a report of tasks that are affected in this way, along with the actual duration column. We then copy and paste everything from the "suggested duration" column into the actual duration column to achieve this functionality. It's extremely burdensome on the sheet because the formulas need to watch out for normal non-working days, holidays, and other scheduling anomolies.

 

Shaine Greenwood

Hi John,

 

This sounds like constraints in MS Project taken to a whole new level by combining it with a more calendar event scheduling logic.

 

I've got your vote down for this on our enhancement request list. Thanks for taking the time to detail this out!