Expand my Community achievements bar.

Fixed due and/or shipping dates

Avatar

Level 1

Hello, I'm new to this group and relatively new to working with Marketing teams in Workfront. I'm curious to get feedback on how people handle a hard due date in the middle of a project. Do you use a Fixed Date and then change the task constraint to As Late As Possible up to that date and then As Soon As Possible for after the hard date? Thanks!

Leigh

Topics

Topics help categorize Community content and increase your ability to discover relevant content.

4 Replies

Avatar

Level 10

Hi Leigh,

Yep, that's a great approach, and one I've used successfully, especially where the audience is also aware of, feeds (by regularly keeping % Complete updated), and monitors Workfront's Projected Dates. I perceive that Projected Dates may have fallen out of favor and off the radar over the years, but in my opinion, they're a powerful tool to help detect and correct schedule slippages (often just by "encouraging" good behavior from those responsible for tracking the % Complete and Open/In Progress/Closed progress of Tasks).

Good luck with it; and here are a few related links, for more reference:

+ Projected Completion Dates vs Planned

+ Overview of the Projected Completion Dates for projects, tasks, and issues

+ Get a Handle on Project Start Dates

Regards,

Doug

Thank you, Doug. Much appreciated! The note on projected dates is helpful because I don't think people really understand how the system handles that, including myself :) I also run into a problem with users not wanting to assign predecessors and so then the timeline doesn't calculate correctly.

Avatar

Level 10

Predecessors are the hardest thing to train, I have the same problem. 100% of my users prefer to must finish on the entire plan. I wish the interface was visual where each task was a box and you have to draw a line from task 1 to task 2 to connect them, i think it would make more sense to people than referring to a line number and duration, it feels too much like math and thinking.

Avatar

Level 1

Jill, have you utilized the Gantt chart view? It doesn't give you a timeline (though I wish it would do that like Microsoft Project does) but does show a visual of the connection between the tasks.