Default Task Constraint

[#1]

As is:

The Task Constraint setting of new tasks can only be influenced indirectly using the Start Date setting, as follows:

Based on the Project Planned Date -> "As soon as possible"

Today -> "Start No Earlier Than (today)"

Desired:

For our Group Admins it would be useful to be able to set Task constraint options as default for the new tasks created in the projects associated with their group.

The ask is to have a setting for the "Task Constraint",  in the settings of a Group > Task & Requests Preferences > New Task Defaults section, similar to the "Duration type"

[#2]

Is this something you can take another look at doing since so many people have requested it? It isn't clear when this decision was made, was it in Feb. 2017 or in 2022?

[#3]

Hopefully, you will revisit this. This would be a great feature to add. A lot of users are not Project Managers and have a lot of issues when changing dates due to the changing task constraints. Having this option would eliminate a lot of problems (frustrations) users are having.

[#4]

Hopefully, you will revisit this. This would be a great feature to add. A lot of users are not Project Managers and have a lot of issues when changing dates due to the changing task constraints. Having this option would eliminate a lot of problems (frustrations) users are having.

[#5]

I just ran into this issue with a team member today. I bulk updated time constraints on the task to allow the team member to change the duration by simply changing the dates on the calendar. Unfortunately, they went to add additional tasks and lost the functionality to do fixed dates. It required them to go into the edit task area to change it manually, which presents some problems. The customer service rep gave me the excellent idea to have time constraints as another column on our project, so users can change it from the project view instead of selecting the task and editing it (1-click versus 6).

[#6]

I agree with this.  For some users, this only happens once in a while, and they get stuck each time trying to figure it out (because they might not have seen it for several months).  

[#7]

Description - Need the ability to change the default task constraint in setup

Why is this feature important to you - Lots of time is spent manually changing from "As soon as possible" to "Fixed dates" on ad hoc tasks outside of templated tasks

How would you like the feature to work - Setup > Tasks > Set default constraint

Current Behaviour - defaults as  "As soon as possible" and there's no way to change the default currently.

[#8]

You do know if you type in a planned start or completion date, it changes the constraint, right?

[#9]

hmm that doesn't work for me. i have a sample training project i opened in April 2018. the planned start date of that project defaults to April 25 2018.

when i try to change it to tomorrow, i get the following error:

Please make sure that your tasks are planned to start and complete on or after the project start date.

[#10]

If you have tasks in a project that are hard coded to start before the desired planned start date of the project, you will get an error. Of course, that task can't start before the project starts and an error should be expected.

This is why hard coded dates are troublesome and cause a lot of problems. They do not flow with the rest of the project because the dates are fixed.

Our organisation's rule is if a task absolutely must start and/or finish on a specific date that will not budge, and you cannot start it early or late, use a "Must" constraint, like in the case of a meeting or an event.

If you have a task that meets this requirement, all that needs to be done is to manually enter that date in either the Planned Start Date or the Planned Completion Date field and the constraint will automatically change.

You can set one of 2 default constraints by going into Setup>Project Preferences>Tasks & Issues and selecting either "Based on the Project Planned Date" which sets the default constraint to ASAP or selecting "Today" which sets the constraint to "Start No Earlier Than (today)". 

We use the latter so it doesn't make tasks look like they were supposed to start when the project started if there's no predecessor. If you put the task in today, chances are it shouldn't have started earlier than today.

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[#11]

I also need the option of setting tasks to default to fixed dates at project level. In certain projects, it is annoying to have to set that manually every time I add a task and need a specific start and end date (OR fill in a duration to account for the time between the start and end dates).