Working with different dates and putting them all together into a Gantt-Chart

[lgaertner]

Hello,

I am looking for some ideas on how to achieve the following...

For the production of different assets for a product launch we have to accommodate different dates in Workfront.

1st sale: as the name describes, the final date, which is important for the customer

due date: the date our marketing team needs to provide the final assets

start date: the date the marketing team needs to start working on the assets

Therefore we create a project template for the product launch and tasks for each step / asset type:

• Project: product xy
  • Task - Product images
  • Task - Flyer
  • Task - Online Banner
  • Task - ...

The due date and the start date can be calculated from the 1st sale date using constant durations, whereas the durations do differ depending on the task.

So 1st sale would live under the project and due date as well as start date are specific for each task.

I am aware of the fact, that for start date and due date the system fields planned start date and planned completion date would be the logical equivalents. 

My challenge is how to accommodate the 1st sale date so that it could be visible in the Gantt-chart as it is not a date which is important for us in regards of performance and finding out if a task is on time.

It would be nice to have the possibility to be a able to show it as a flag in the Gantt-chart. Unfortunately the Gantt-chart, which is available from program or project does only provide some static settings. I also tried around using a calendar, which lets us work with custom fields, but here I am not able to bring different dates into one row. 

So, misuse of a system field could lead to wrong calculations.

For now I created a milestone called 1st sale and assign it to an extra task. But this as well is not really satisfying.

I hope I was able to explain, what the problem is and perhaps someone has some ideas, thoughts or solutions, which could help me.

Thanks in advance.

Regards
Lars

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore · Accepted solution]

Hi @lgaertner,

Intriguing (and familiar) challenge.

I have several thoughts and suggestions, but will start with two:

• if your process can accommodate a twist, setting a convention in your templates and projects of defining a zero duration Must Start On task called 1st Sale would then make it possible to include that 1st Sale task in Workfront’s standard gantt reporting
• alternatively, I invite you to consider our UberGantt solution, which was designed for this exact usecase of comparing a project level key date (eg 1st Sale) against certain other task level key dates (eg planned start, planned completion for each Task), as shown in this video

I’m interested to hear how the former works out, and happy to chat about the latter via doug.denhoed@atappstore.com

Regards,

Doug