Way To Adjust Project's Start Date Based On First Task

[AnthonyIm]

One of our agencies has a series a projects that are interdependent on each other. One project cannot start until the previous project finishes. We set it up so the predecessor of the first task of Project 2 is the last task of Project 1 and it works perfectly. However, when reporting (both list and Gantt view), all the projects have a Planned Start Date of Monday (when the proejcts were created) and a Projected date of today. Any ideas on how to adjust or report on what the start will be based on the start date of the first task? So they can see how the projects are actually related to each other?

[EricLu2]

Hi: I just recreated what I think you described. The dependent task (Project 2) has a planned start date linked to the finish of the independent task (Project 1). The project-level planned start date of project 2 is still today, but I wouldn’t look at the project start date to know the planned start date of the project, since the real start date is determined by the dependent task, not the project start date. If the real dates are on the task, I wouldn’t look at the project-level information for start dates. The project is still scheduled to start, but because the dependent task starts much later, there is a bunch of implicit lag between the project -level start date and the start date of the first task. [cid:image001.jpg@01D1B122.7EBC7760] Does that make sense? Am I close to replicating what you see? ________________________________

[NRYNR]

Have you tried changing the Planned Start Date manually under Edit Project to match the start date of the first task?

[AnthonyIm]

The problem is that I need it to be a project report as all the information that the client needs to see is the high-level project information throughout the year (especially since the client wants a Gantt Chart of all the projects in their Portfolio). A task report would not be ideal for this. For now we can go through and adjust all the Project start dates but once Project one kicks off, you know things are going to change/get push and so those start dates will not be accurate. I was hoping the projected start date for the project would work since work on the project isn't really starting on the project until the first task starts. But that is not the case. Hoping someone on here has a miracle solution. ;)

[ChrisMu]

I'm not sure if this will help but have you looked at using project baselines? When a project moves to current status a baseline is set. You can go to project preferences and select "Create Baselines automatically". If you process alows for the start date to be the date the project is moved to current status, you can then use the baseline date as your start date for reporting. Use: "Default Baseline: Actual Start Date".

[GregBe1]

When we create our projects, our Task #1 is always the rollup task so it's pretty much named the same as the project. If you did this, could you create a task report and still get your Project Info? So if our Project was, "Build a road to nowhere", our task#1 would be "Build a road to nowhere", and the start and end dates of this task would be for the whole project and it would have a cross-project predecessor from the other project, so as the task from the other project would change, so would this roll-up task, and therefore the report would also change accordingly.

[EricLu2]

You could do that - you would filter the tasks where the indent is zero. That would pick off that one task. You could also select the task number, too. We do the same! Eric

[AnthonyIm]

Hi Greg, That is what we ended up doing. Adding an ultimate parent task to every project so we could set the filter to look at task number 1. It is a task report with all Project fields except Planned Start and Planned completion. We also had to do some text mode for columns and groupings since some of the information we needed is out of the box for project but not for tasks. We got it to work just took a lot more enough than we thought it should have taken. ;) And thank God for the copy report functionality! :)