Milestone Dependency SF

Hello Sven Passinger, 

This is Aaron from Wrike Customer Support, thank you for your question!

If I understand correctly, you are setting up a project to be duplicated when someone submits an external request form and you would like the date entered in the external request form to be the date of the milestone at the end of your project. I can also see that the start of your project should be set for 20 working days before the milestone date, but you're running into some difficulties when adding a dependency to a milestone.

By design, milestones do not shift on the Gantt chart when task dependencies are added or when tasks are rescheduled. So to set up your project, I'd recommend you first convert your milestone into a 1-day task by entering the same start date as the due date for the milestone. This will allow you to create the dependencies you need for your project.

Please take a look at this example "Project W" on the Gantt chart:​​
We have all the tasks for our project connected with Finish to Start dependencies, but we want to connect the first task to the milestone with a Start to Finish dependency, and we need to make sure the first task starts 20 working days before the milestone.

First, convert the milestone into a regular task of 1-day duration by entering a start date that is the same as the due date:​​

Now we need to add a Start to Finish dependency with a Lag time of 20 days. You can create a Lag time by typing "+" followed by the number of days:
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Once you add the Start to Finish dependency with the "+ 20 d" Lag time to the dependency, the "milestone" task is automatically pushed out 20 working days from the first task in your project.

Now we can convert the "milestone" task back into an actual milestone by deleting the start date:
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If you would like your external request form to create a new project from this template, and you want the new project to have the milestone's date set by the request form, please make sure that you have a date-type question in your request form that maps to the End date of your project, and that you have your request form set to reschedule the tasks in the new project based on that End date:
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Now, when someone submits your external request form and specifies the date they want the project to be finished, your new project will use this as the date for the milestone, and the first task in your new project will be scheduled to start 20 working days before the milestone.

For more information, please check out our Help Center:

• Lag time in task dependencies: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/209604229-Dependencies-on-the-Gantt-Chart-#lag
• External request forms: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004742769-External-Request-Forms
• Creating a request form, mapping responses, and duplicating an existing project, task, or Blueprint using the request form: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004740045-Create-a-Request-Form-for-Admins-#create

Please let me know if you have any questions, or if you would like me to share some additional information - I am happy to help! 😀

mdr

Hi @...,

I do not know why you think this is connected to external request forms.

I have a simple problem with the milestone:

1. I get a milestone from outside (I am in R&D and production says, to deliver to customer we have to start on 01.12.20 with the manufacturing). So this is a fixed date.Or not only fixed: not in time, means missing big buiseness, so it is more like a god given law.

2. we know that we have to start with a things at least 20 before this milestone.

So what I need is a possibility to make a calculation backward from a milestone and to be sure that if the task is shifted behind the milestone. I want to show that the milestone is the starting. So i do not want to make

I would like to make the task dependent of the milestone. But when I do so the SF dependency is automatically changed to FF by Wrike

mdr

Hello Sven Passinger, 

This is Lisa from Wrike Customer Support, thank you for elaborating on your use-case!

SF dependency in Wrike is not designed for scheduling backward, but I can definitely understand where you're coming from. I will submit your feedback to our product team internally, and if you have a spare minute, please feel free to submit a feature suggestion to a Product Feedback section and link to the post to this thread so that other Community members are able to easily check it out, upvote your suggestion, and add their idea to the thread. This really helps! 🙌

In the meantime, let's try to find out how to achieve this within the current setup. As far as I understand, you need to make sure that the first task is scheduled at least 20 days prior to the milestone and have an indicator if it is shifted behind. There is no warning in this case if you add SF dependency (which is converted to FF dependency) from the first task to the milestone:

That is why, please consider adding SF dependency with the 20 days Lag Time to the milestone, as Aaron has suggested in the previous reply:

If the first task is shifted to start less than 20 days prior to the milestone, the dependency will be highlighted in red, so your team will know that the schedule requires adjustments. Here is how it looks like:

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Would this help?

mdrmdrmdr

Lisa K. Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Erfahren Sie mehr über Wrikes leistungsstarke Funktionen und lernen Sie Anwendungsbeispiele kennen

Lisa K. Wrike Team member Erfahren Sie mehr über Wrikes leistungsstarke Funktionen und lernen Sie Anwendungsbeispiele kennen

Hi Lisa,

is there also a possibility for projectmanagers to make a dashboard where all tasks which have such a highlighted dependency are shown?

So does the projectmanager always have to look into the Gannt or is there a way to show such tasks in a dashboard?

The dashboards are the key tool in Wrike for us and it would be much better as a manager of several projects if I could see a summary over all my projects if there is such dependency not met.

Or is there any other possibility to make a report about several projects about such not met dependencies?

Regards

Sven

mdr

Hi Sven Passinger

Glad to hear your positive feedback about Wrike Dashboards. This feature is surely one of our strengths. To check scheduling conflicts, please try a "Conflicts monitor" widget - it will show you tasks with the dependency arrows highlighted in red:

To create one, please open the Dashboard > click "+ New Widget" > choose "Conflicts Monitor".
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Here is how the widget looks like:
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There is no template or filter to create such a Report, I'm afraid. I hope the Dashboard could work for your team.

Please, give it a try and let us know if any questions!

mdrmdr

Lisa K. Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Erfahren Sie mehr über Wrikes leistungsstarke Funktionen und lernen Sie Anwendungsbeispiele kennen

Lisa K. Wrike Team member Erfahren Sie mehr über Wrikes leistungsstarke Funktionen und lernen Sie Anwendungsbeispiele kennen