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Project Schedule Should Override Individual User's Schedule

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Level 2

6/28/24

Current Behaviour / Description - Both the project and individual user settings have an option to select a schedule. If you select the project setting to have option A (no holidays) and the individual user setting to have option B (company holidays), the project will not use the project setting option A if an individual user is assigned a task. If two or more people are assigned a task however, then the task will default to the project setting of option A. The reason the project setting works is due to the system project preferences: When multiple users are assigned to a task, use the schedule of the....Project. 

How would you like the feature to work - We should be able to use the project setting to override the individual user's setting.  

Why is this feature important to you - Users work on different types of projects. Some are more time sensitive that others so we should be able to select the schedule that works best for the project type.

 

Additional Notes: This really becomes a problem with you have predecessors with long lag times or durations. Tasks can get pushed out pretty far from all the vacation and time off. Another idea would be to have the project exclude holidays and time off when calculating duration / lag time but avoid scheduling the actual due date on a holiday. 

 

For additional information, refer to: Case Number 00406587 - Schedule functionality not working as expected [ ref:!00D3006HBH.!5004X01z7BqB:ref ] 

1 Comment

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Level 1

8/13/24

It would be great to have the ability to choose the project schedule as the only mechanism used to calculate start/end timing correctly in a project plan. We also see issues when users have schedules in different time zones and a single user from a different time zone can significantly alter all downstream timing planned for tasks, causing dates to shift out.

 

There are organizations that are planning down to the hour and probably love the current way this works. BUT there are other organizations where their use case requires the specific dates be accurate in the plan. In the case of dates being accurate we cannot get the system to adhere to that without working around the automatic assignment of the schedule Workfront thinks is correct rather than what the project owner knows is correct. This creates scenarios where a lot of manual intervention is required for the project owner to get their project timing updated. Example:  If you have a plan with 20 tasks and 15 of them get altered because of 1 user schedule from a different time zone you've created a scenario where the only way to correct this is to manually intervene and modify predecessors and/or force start/end times to fix the problem. We shouldn't be increasing the admin work of maintaining a project plan, we should be giving people options to decrease that manual maintenance.  This is currently a use case that Workfront misses entirely or must be worked around by NOT utilizing user schedules when those do bring other advantages.

See Workfront's own example here:  https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/basics/tips-tricks-for-basics/working-acr...

This (user) schedule might be different from a project schedule. For example, when someone creates a task in the project and hasn’t assigned anyone to it yet, the task uses the project schedule. When a user is assigned to the task, the task uses that user’s schedule.

If multiple users are assigned to a task, the system uses one of the following, as configured in the system-wide project preferences:

  • The time zone for the schedule of the task’s primary owner
  • The time zone for the schedule of the project.

This can cause tasks dates to change.

Example: An EST user is assigned to a one-day task scheduled to start at 9:00 AM PST, which is noon EST. Because the EST user has only 2 working hours remaining for the day, the task completion date extends by about 6 hours into the next working day.