[Status: Backburner ⌛️]Adding Dependencies to tasks with no Date field
I don't know how much of a common need this is for other people but I feel the ability to add dependency to a task without specifying a certain date would be nice. Some of my company's projects happen quite fast and sometimes it is hard to give firm dates on when certain tasks should be done. However it would be nice to still be able to set dependencies on tasks to indicate to my Project Management Team that one task should come before another. In other words, I need to indicate that a Project Manager can't complete a certain task without the completion of the other, without auto generating completion dates for those tasks.
Of course you can give temporary dates for each task when making dependencies but those date are most likely incorrect and indicate that we have a bunch of incomplete tasks when in all actuality that task might not even be started yet. When scanning over statistics for all projects this could be a little misleading.
If this is completely outside the scope of the product I completely understand. It was just a thought. Thanks!
Hi Simone Paradiso, welcome to the Community 👋
Thank you for supporting this idea! If you'd like to discover what this Community has to offer, I'd recommend checking our our New to Community forum!
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
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I used the free version of Wrike for more than a year before I was able to convince my marketing department to purchase and implement Wrike. Now that we have it, learning the ability to create dependencies without dates does not exist is rather surprising, even five years after this was initially brought up.
It's clear this is a hot topic item, yet it is discouraging to see it's not something that will be addressed any time soon.
We have a project blueprint with 16 steps and the dependencies are in linear form (for 2 to start, 1 has to be completed; for 3 to start, 2 has to be completed, etc.). For some of our projects we utilize this blueprint, step 12 (for example) may take two weeks, or it may take two days, it all depends on the specific project (but the steps remain the same).
There's no way to determine said duration when the project from the blueprint is initially created. We create a project (a deliverable) from the blueprint and rescheduled upon the the date the deliverable needs to be in the client's hands. When we discover the timeline of step 12 and reschedule it accordingly to the duration, the dates of tasks 1 through 11 not change accordingly; only the subsequent tasks (13 through 16).
One would think this would be Project Management 101 to reschedule the tasks 1 through 11 if the date of 12 is changed, but this is not the case.
Again, extremely discouraging.
Hi Chris Schanz, thank you for bringing this to us. I have opened a ticket with our Support Team so one of our agents can investigate your case and confirm if your tasks are being rescheduled as expected when you create from your blueprints, you will be contacted soon 👍
Really need to have an option in blueprints at least to have dependencies unhooked from dates.
Hi Mike J Roach, welcome to the Community! May I please ask you to elaborate a bit on your use case so we can provide you with an accurate reply? 🙂
Also, please feel free to visit our New to Community forum to get the most out of your experience with our Community 👍
Thank you!
Adding another upvote for this feature. We frequently map out timelines without knowing the exact start date of an activity, When I set the dependency the system automatically assigns a start date of today. When I delete the date it removes the dependency. This makes the system effectively unusable for planning which is very frustrating.
Thanks a lot for sharing your feedback here John Schaeffer, we appreciate it. I'm sending your input to the respective Product team now 👍
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
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Adding my vote to this as well - pretty critical for planning out projects especially when you know they are coming but the start date will vary (potentially by months)
This functionality would be so useful, particularly during product development when the tasks are dependent on things like formula revisions, product testing, and vendor management - and none of those things have a very predictable timetable. It'd be great to have the choice on whether it had a date associated with the dependency. Sometimes the dates are critical for the dependency, and other times they are completely irrelevant.
Hi Jessie Stith and Jack Skinner, welcome to the Community Jack! Thank you for supporting this suggestion, I've passed your comments on to our dedicated team. We will keep you informed in case any changes are implemented 👍
Please, let us know if there is anything else we could help you with.
Well, this thread was heartbreaking. I can't believe that I am not able to have a predecessor without having a duration attached. That basically means that I can't use the predecessor automation AT ALL since my projects don't allow me to have durations. Ugh. So disappointing.
I'm sorry to hear that Adam Pfeifer. Please rest assured we'll share your feedback with our team 👍
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Just to add my thoughts to this - would be great to have this feature. Sometimes I just want to show that one task is dependant on another being completed, but the latter task might not be needed for days or weeks, or might have a fluid start date as it is not a priority compared to other tasks so it can be finished whenever, but the preceding task must be completed. So it would be good to set dependencies without the need to specify dates.
Thank you for supporting this suggestion Boris Sevsek 🙌
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hi, I'd love to know if there is a status update on this request. It looks like it's currently on the backburner, but is there any discussion of moving this up in the short term product development roadmap? It has been a topic of discussion in this community for the past five years, so I think it would be nice to re-visit. I echo all the comments above surrounding this request.
This is also something our team would find extremely beneficial as auto-assigning based on completion of predecessor tasks is risky for our team -- Everyone likes to know what's coming down the pipe and make sure to maintain their own project calendars to anticipate projects, but if they're only assigned when other tasks are completed, they may not know about a project until the last minute. Adding dependencies to blueprints without any dates would help us fix this problem and improve our workflow, and it seems it would also help a lot of other organizations as this suggestion has been repeatedly brought up in this thread since 2017. Would love to know if there's any update here and when we can expect this to, hopefully, be implemented? Thank you!
Hi all! Thank you for continuing to share your feedback about this suggestion with us; at the moment we don't have updates to share; however, please rest assured that we will keep you informed if there are any changes 👍
Just migrating to Wrike from another platform. I would very much like to see this feature be added. I really breaks our workflow when working with templates to not allow for dependencies without due dates.
Hello,
It seems apparent that this will not be addressed. I'm wondering if there are workarounds you can create that would allow us to create task dependencies based on completion dates in a different format?
Thanks,
Kristy
Hey Kristy Schaan, I can't think of a workaround for this one, so I asked our Support team to look into this for you. Please feel free to share if there are any solutions. Thank you!
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
I'll add another vote for being able to set dependencies without assigning dates/task lengths, and/or an option for the project start date to be layered into dependencies, or be aligned with a particular task, so that updating the project start date would then update dates for all subtasks that have dependencies.
Like others, we know we have upcoming projects, but the start dates are undetermined at the time of project inception and are at the discretion of our customers. We receive a purchase order months ahead of a project beginning, meaning we have a large pool of unscheduled items at any given time. 99% of our projects follow the same task flow with the same dependencies, but we are unable to make use of these without creating the project when a customer schedules(which doesn't work as there are processes that we track internally through Wrike), which leaves us manually setting dates, which opens the door for errors.
Hello,
This feature would be very useful for us too so I upvote this one but seeing the date of creation of this feedback and the 239 upvotes at the moment and nothing, I am not very hopeful !
Regards,
Hi there. I too am also looking for the following...
This is a big issue for us, and by the looks of it, has been an issue for many of your clients for over 5 years.
Hi everyone 👋, thank you all for taking the time to post your feedback. We are now passing it on to the responsible team. We understand that some of our users are looking for this functionality. If there's any development in the future, I'll make sure to post the update here.
Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Rohan V Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Rohan V Any update from product development on the addition of dependencies without dates? This thread goes all the way back to 2019 and hasn't been resolved. I'm working on process improvement efforts and this is a major roadblock.
Hi Kaitlyn Handell, thanks for reaching out. I understand this thread is from a few years ago. Unfortunately, there are no new updates at this time. We will post here if there are any developments on this topic. Thanks again for your patience and understanding.
Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Rohan V Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Dropping another vote of support for this idea. It would be a massive improvement to our team's workflow.