Adding Buffer time to Workflow schedules

[ElysiaYu]

Hi,

We are wanting to add buffer time in our workflow schedules. Projects tend to run late and miss the Completion date. To help mitigate this, we wanted to schedule extra time in the schedule that we can use if some of the tasks are running late. What is the best practice to do this? We've been playing around with constraints to always run as soon as possible or put one task in the schedule. We've tried adding lag times on predecessors and considered adding an extra task with the buffer built-in.

The issues we run into that we don't want the people assigned to the task to know there's a buffer because then the work will get procrastinated further. We also are trying to refine our resource scheduling so that the effort doesn't equally divide across the duration of days. And we would like to have this be automated if possible, but ensure make sure that all of the tasks are done by the project's planned completion date.

What does everyone do to plan for unforeseen risks that could put a project late but still deliver it on time?

[RandyRoberts]

As a general philosophy, I have always set the deadline 3 to 5 days before the real deadline. I'd be very interested to know how to stop WF from splitting hours up evenly amongst duration days whitout manually doing it.

[ElysiaYu]

Thank you for your response. If you set the deadline a few days before the real deadline, how do your teams know when the deliverable goes live? For example, if you have an email that needs to be sent on June 9 but the planned completion date is set to June 6, how do the teams know to send it on June 9 instead of June 6?

As far as I understand it, the way to stop WF from splitting up hours to add a lag in the predecessor.

[RandyRoberts · Accepted solution]

OK, I understand better what you're trying to do now. For an email specifically, if the email must be done by say june 15 and gets sent out on June 18 I would set the "done" task constraint as "No Later Than" and then the "Send" task as Must Start On" or "Fixed Dates" with a hard date.

Like:

[ElysiaYu]

Ah, so that makes sense. Basically you have a task in there to know when the deliverable will be completed, and then another one on when to send the email.

Thank you!