Level 5

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Can you calculate the date difference between the previous task's completion and the current date?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
March 23, 2021
5 replies
1051 views

Use case: I can show how many days past the Planned Start Date a task is no problem, but how best to represent its true idle state? For instance, a task may have been intended originally to start ten days ago, but the predecessor was only completed yesterday. I'd like to show that the task that's 10 days late is really only behind 1 days from the time it could have actually started. That way the managers can truly see when their team is slow in responding to work.

DATEDIFF seems to work really well within a task, but less obviously so between them.

If there's also another way to get at the same answer, I'm game to learn.

Any help would be awesome!

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Best answer by Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore

Hi Ryan,

When a Task's Predecessors are all at last complete, that Task's Handoff Date is then populated to celebrate the occasion, and the Task's Can Start is set to True. Given that, one way to improve the measurement you seek could be to conditionally base the DATEDIFF off the appropriate driver using a series of IF statements and ISBLANKs (e.g. Handoff Date if it is present and later than the Planned Start Date, otherwise Start Date, assuming people don't get points for starting early).

Regards,

Doug

Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore

Accepted solution

Community Advisor

Hi Ryan,

When a Task's Predecessors are all at last complete, that Task's Handoff Date is then populated to celebrate the occasion, and the Task's Can Start is set to True. Given that, one way to improve the measurement you seek could be to conditionally base the DATEDIFF off the appropriate driver using a series of IF statements and ISBLANKs (e.g. Handoff Date if it is present and later than the Planned Start Date, otherwise Start Date, assuming people don't get points for starting early).

Regards,

Doug

R

Ryan_McGeeAuthor

Level 5

Never knew about that field, thank you! That did it.

Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore

Community Advisor

My pleasure Ryan; glad that did the trick.

Yeah, Handoff Date is a very useful field with which to get acquainted. One minor gotcha (as discussed earlier this week) is that it currently doesn't work quite as expected when cross-project predecessors are in play.

Regards,

Doug

H

HaroldBa1

Level 2

I've noticed in our instance that the handoff date for a parent task seems to default to the planned start date for the project. Is that unique to my instance? Have we, perhaps, missing a setting somewhere that would have the parent task "inherit" its handoff date from the child tasks?

Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore

Community Advisor

Hi Harold,

That might be a bug, but might also be As Designed (although I too find it a bit counter intuitive): unless the Parent Task has a predecessor, since (technically) "there's nothing preventing it from starting", its Handoff Date effectively starts as soon as the Project Starts...even if the first task among its children than has a predecessor (technically) "preventing it from starting until its predecessors are complete".

Regards,

Doug

H

HaroldBa1

Level 2

Thanks Doug. I'd be curious to know if it is, as you say, a "bug" or a "feature". In our workflow, we have a few milestones that are attached to parent tasks (probably not the best idea, but one plays the hand one has been dealt), and that handoff date causes complications in reporting.

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