Predecessors in clonflict

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

Answers

  • Julie Fortney
    Julie Fortney Overachievers

    Hi Aaron,

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

  • AaronO
    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
    Julie Fortney Overachievers

    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: