Fixed project end date with predecessors

jrhall

I have a plan with durations and predecessors. I was given a hard end for the project to finish. Is there a way for smartsheet to calculate the start and end dates for the tasks leading up to the hard finish date?

Dale Murphy

@jrhall If you build your plan with "start-to-finish predecessors" you can work backwards from a fixed end date to the start date needed to meet that finish date. if you use Predecessor type start-to-finish you can get what you want.

(Roughly put, Task n will have Task n+1 as a "predecessor" of type SF. If Task n+1 starts October 5, Task n will show a finish date of October 4. The start date for task n will be October 4 - (duration of Task n))

dm

PeggyLang

@Dale Murphy
This is very intriguing, however, I'm having some trouble conceptualizing.
I have a retail client who likes to back EVERY task from the open date. Each of my predecessors look like '94 FS, -#d'. This makes the gantt chart fairly useless and messy;

I haven't played with changing FS to SF - would that change things such that the gantt chart looks more like this?

Grateful for your insight.

ChristianFinke

Hi @jrhall

You can use start-to-finish (SF) dependencies to work backward from your project’s fixed end date. This way, each task’s start and finish are based on when the following task needs to start. It can make your Gantt chart a bit tricky, but it gets the job done.

If you’d like to brainstorm further, feel free to email me at cfinke@digitalradius.com.

Best,