Predecessors in clonflict
Hi all,
Consider this situation:
- report is due 8/1/22
- work is complete on 6/1/22
- report is written - predecessors are #2 and #3FF
If the report takes 2 days to write, those two days will end on 8/1, since there's a FF predecessor relationship - great.
If the report takes 90 days to write, the predecessors are in conflict - can't start writing the report until the work is done, but the report has to be done by the deadline.
In this case, smartsheet silently violates the FF predecessor:
Is there a way to find this conflict? It would be very helpful if conflicting relationships were called out - make the link from "report due" to "write report" and/or make the predecessors column red or something. Silently ignoring the constraint seems problematic.
thanks,
Aaron
Answers
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Hi Aaron,
Could you share a screenshot of the grid view with row numbers shown?
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Sure thing!
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Hi, just bumping this to see if the SS hosts have any thoughts. This issue of invalid predecessor relationships bit me again recently - without an error indication it took me a while to find it.
In playing with the issue, I discovered a related but slightly different behavior:
Here I have three predecessor relationships to the same predecessor. Seems like this should not be legal and should also be highlighted as an error condition.
thanks!
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Hi @AaronO. That's an interesting point. I did some testing, and it appears that the dependencies are considered using the following precedence:
- FS (the default)
- FF
- SS
I agree that it would be a huge help for Smartsheet to flag conflicting predecessors.
Just for reference, here's a test sheet I used to confirm the precedence:
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