Can I use predecessors to drive both the Start and End dates for a single task?

Brian Chapin

My schedule has two sets of high level tasks. One from the Engineering side and one from the Business side. We have a nice work breakdown from the engineering side, but it doesn’t cleanly align with the items from the business side. We were hoping that we could use dependencies to drive the dates for the line items on the Business side.

For example I tried setting BusinessItem1 as having a SS dependency on EngineeringItem1 and a FF dependency on EngineeringItem2 in hopes that this would drive both of those dates and calculate the duration based on the difference between these dates.

This didn’t work, it respects the FF link and generates the correct end date and assigns a 1 day duration.

Is there a way to drive both of these dates WITHOUT breaking up each of the Business Items into multiple tasks? 

Joe Goetschel

The only thing I can think of would be the following.

Make 2 separate project plans to track each one separately. Then make a 3rd project plan where you link the 2 together. Then you can set the predecessors back and forth between the 2 projects.

Hope this helps! I had to do this for about 12 separate projects that were all intertwined but needed 1 end date.

Brian Chapin

Thanks for the thoughts, but it looks like this is a bit of a moot point now.

We were looking for a way to treat a Summary Task like a miles stone and let the dependencies populate the data that the business unit needs.

I did come up with a few ways to work with this, but they are all very involved and we are now re-visiting the original breakdown of items to better them with the technical work.