Predecessors in clonflict

AaronO

Hi all,

Consider this situation:

1. report is due 8/1/22
2. work is complete on 6/1/22
3. 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

Julie Fortney

Hi Aaron,

Could you share a screenshot of the grid view with row numbers shown?

AaronO

Sure thing!

AaronO

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!

Julie Fortney

Hi @AaronO. That's an interesting point. I did some testing, and it appears that the dependencies are considered using the following precedence:

1. FS (the default)
2. FF
3. 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: