Hi Shelly, Yeah, I completely understand your point. We can't change our implementation dates in IT either J . I'm not saying you would change your advertised implementation date. You just allow the tool to record the accurate date, and it lets you know that time must be made up somewhere and then you can make the adjustment you spoke of. You can (should) even make the adjustments to the project plan to ensure it has the desired effect. For example, I might add a resource to a task (and thus change the Duration of the task) to see if that helps reel the date in. If it does, your plan is accurately reflecting you're on time. If it doesn't, you know you have more work to do and you keep working the plan to see where you can make up the time. If you lock them you often won't know you're 2 days (or 2 weeks) behind until you're close to deployment (and then you're scrambling). We've all been there. This is just one tool/method to help prevent that last minute/week/month J scramble (or at least reduce it). In our Project Status we have two dates: Implementation Date : This is the advertised and unchanging date (this is the date you're referring to) Current Project Plan Implementation Date : This is what my project plan currently reads. If I'm 2 days behind on a project going live next year, I'm not too worried. If it's going live next week, I'm making adjustments. Just FYI, this is not something I created. This is a PMI standard type thing. Locked Dates endanger the project plan "truthiness" (Colbert, 2014), so we advise using them as little as possible (like if a Training Class is booked on a specific date). But locking regular tasks tend to get us in trouble, as projects rarely run exactly on schedule. So we want to know how we're tracking (for me on a weekly basis). Hope that helps. Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT | Sr. IT Project Manager Denver Water | t: 303-628-7262 | c: 303-319-6473 "http://www.denverwater.org/">
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