Dependencies deleted when start date changes

Org Knoetze

Hi Smartsheeters,

I have ditched MS Projects in favor of Smarsheet back in 2012. Haven't used for about 2 years and just sold it again to executive management at a new company I have started. Been building schedules in Smartsheet the last 2-3 weeks and just today remembered why I have ditched Smartsheet.

Here's the scenario. Teams Meeting, 5-8 participants from different countries, everybody poised to get cracking at sequencing tasks and suddenly I vaguely remember one of biggest scheduling shortcomings/issue/problem I had in the past. One cannot chop and change dates for tasks with dependencies without something getting broken along the way.

I know there are many work-arounds but honestly, every PM tool I have worked with in past have the ability to move tasks on the Gannt and keeping "ALL" dependencies in place. And yes, as a PMP, I am very much aware of industry standards and what "the correct" way is of doing scheduling but in the real word, as it plays out when team members from different time zones have to wait for a painful process of repairing broken dependencies. You want the ability to shift dates at will without additional work.

Spent a quick 5-10m searching the community forums but couldn't get any official feedback from Smartsheet regarding this. Any of you perhaps know what the official stance is on this as I think it might be a game ender for us?

Much appreciated

Georg

Genevieve P.

Hi @Org Knoetze

You're correct, Smartsheet's Predecessor functionality is currently set so that if you manually change a Start Date of a task that has a Predecessor, it will remove the Predecessor data. In order to update the Start Date of a Dependent task while keeping the Predecessor, you would either need to adjust the end date of the Predecessor, or add Lag/Lead time to indicate a space between the two tasks (see the bottom of this article: Enable Dependencies and Use Predecessors).

If I've misunderstood your scenario it would be helpful to see screen captures - before and after - and I'd be happy to confirm if this is expected behaviour or not.

Cheers,

Genevieve