Change duration instead of dates?

Oooh, now that is an interesting idea, Heather, A few years ago (thread 23 on "https://community.workfront.com/discussions/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=0a9d8b02-1f3e-4b61-af22-7d32e7f3b2e2&CommunityKey=aaafaff0-5e4e-4e38-8903-f1f990935567&tab=digestviewer#bm0a9d8b02-1f3e-4b61-af22-7d32e7f3b2e2">this post ), we enhanced our "http://store.atappstore.com/product/ubercalc/">UberCalc solution to automatically override (unwanted/inadvertent) Commit Dates "back" to their (official/reinforced) Planned Completion Dates (e.g. nightly), to ensure that Workers were aware of and aligned with the same timeline as the PM was intending. Following your "power to the Workers" suggestion, though, we could have UberCalc apply the reverse logic, automatically setting the (outdated/unrealistic) Planned Completion Date to match the (latest/human-confirmed) Commit Date, thereby keeping the PM (and owners, etc.) aware of what's most likely really going to happen. And (bonus) since UberCalc uses a filter to determine which Tasks to consider in each case, certain (top down) Projects could use the former approach, and other (grass roots) Projects could use the latter. In each case, it removes the manual grunt work of forever trying to "catch up" with the date changes, and instead simply presents the latest best known version of the truth. Regards, Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

Yeah, you would lose pred ability. So I don't see a way to accomplish that in WF. But changing the Duration is barely more difficult than changing the date. You're just changing one field instead of the other. The only difference is you have to do a little math. Hopefully if the plans are kept up to date regularly, you're only moving the date by a few days or a week, so the math is easy. Just keeping in mind it's counting in Business days. Honestly I also hated this process at first. But once I did it, the reality is it's not difficult at all.

Thank you Heather. This was a super helpful recommendation and allowed me to achieve my end result. Stephanie Brown NXT Capital

Hi all - thank you very much for all of the replies. Adding the Task Constraint column to my view, as recommended by Heather, helped considerably as I was then able to modify the constraint as I went to achieve the desired results. As a follow up question - where are these Task Constraints originally coming from? When I start a new project and start adding tasks - is there a default somewhere on my project or in a template setup where this is defined globally for my project? Also, when I added the Task Constraint column to my view my constraints were initially all over the place - I kind of expected that since I hadn't modified them they would have all be set to one constraint? Thanks again for the help. Stephanie Stephanie Brown NXT Capital

hi there, were you able to access the link I referenced above? Workfront Support wrote a lovely section on how constraints come to be. "https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/217297147-Task-Constraint-Overview" title="https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/217297147-Task-Constraint-Overview">https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/217297147-Task-Constraint-Overview Your task constraints will change themselves if you fiddle around with your dates for sure. For example, something cannot be set to "As soon as possible" AND have fixed start and end dates, so as soon as you change your dates, you will notice that the task constraint will automatically change to accommodate what it assumes was your intention. And yes, you should check your templates. Any task constraint on a templated task will carry over to the project. -skye

Thank you Skye. I had looked at your link previously but just reviewed the first chart the first time. I have now read through and you are correct - this is very helpful! Stephanie Brown NXT Capital