Parent Task Predecesors

[LukaszMa]

Dear All,

Does anyone know if assigning predecessors to parent task causes any issues or is not a good practice when building your timeline or template? Has anyone seen any documentation related to this matter? We have several templets at use and our Project team reports that project timelines do not recalculate upon changes where parent task include predecessors. I believe this occurs randomly.

Thanks,

Lukasz

[KellieGardner · Accepted solution]

We use predecessors on parent tasks and don't seem to have any issues.

Make sure that the duration types on tasks aren't set as hard constraint types such as must finish on or must start on.

[LukaszMa]

Thanks Kellie,

We use ASAP as the common constrain across all templates, still the PMs report having issues with timelines not calculating properly on change.

[KellieGardner]

If project managers are changing the dates on their projects at all it will update the task constraint. Even though you've set it at the template level any changes to dates could affect it on an individual project. 

[LukaszMa]

Hi Kellie,

Yes I am aware of this behaviour and its part of my investigation. However from memory I have experienced the same issue in the past when managing company projects and it was noted previously by PMs that having predecessors on parent task does affect timeline sync.

[KellieGardner]

Sorry this won't help then, we've never experienced this in our instance and rely heavily on parent tasks holding our predecessors - only when PMs are hard picking their dates causing Must Finish or Start on .  Report back if you find out anything, I'd love to know what causes your issues so I can note it for any use cases that come up here. 

[DeniseMoore]

Hello! We definitely use predecessors and cross project predecessors on parent tasks. And we enforce most of our predecessors as well. Something to maybe check out is whether your projects' "Summary Completion Mode" is set to automatic or manual. We have ours set within all of our project templates as "automatic" so the status and percent complete of our parent tasks are automatically updated based on the children tasks.

Hope this helps. : )

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @LukaszMa,

In addition to the ideas @DeniseMoore and @KellieGardner offered, I suggest you review this Pop Quiz: Cross Project Predecessor Toughies post, which might also be related.

Regards,

Doug