[Status: Backburner ⌛️] Setting and locking start / end dates or duration

@..., thank you for the update. However, this is a great example of what frustrates the user base. There is feedback being provided about an improvement that many people would find not only useful, but very much needed for their industry and how they work. Yet the Product team has decided they have no interest in responding to the request with a solution.

I disagree that the UI would be more complex. It's really simple. Put a little lock icon next to each of the 3 fields, and when we click on one to lock it, the dates are calculated accordingly with that field being anchored and not changing. For example as mentioned above, if the user want the duration to be 40 days and not change, they lock it. Now when they change one of the dates, the other date changes accordingly to maintain a 40 day duration. It's pretty straight forward. There are 3 variables; lock one and then you have 2 variables to adjust; the first would be manually adjusted by the user, which leaves the last variable to be adjusted as a result of the one changed by the user. 

I see too many times that the feedback and ideas from the users are responded with "not on the road map", which to us reads as "nope, we're not going to do that". I understand that you can't do everything, but many requests aren't radical, complicated endeavors. Many ideas are for valid features to allow us to use the platform better, and that allow people form different industries to work in the manner that they need to in their context. This is a great example of a small request that would be extremely helpful to most everyone, reducing the frustration on how it currently works, and providing excellent value return on the effort to accomplish it. 

I too agree that this feature needs to be implemented. Currently the only way I can block a task from being rescheduled is by using milestones which is not helpful when the task has a true set duration that cannot change. In our organization, this type of scheduling is very important and as this software is very powerful, this is a major drawback for our use. 

@...,

Thanks for the follow-up. I totally understand that there are too many suggestions to address them all in a timely manner. This happens to be one that is pretty simple but would positively impact a huge portion of the user base. So I see it as having great ROI value versus something that would require a ton of work but only help a small few.

That was kind of my point in that this has a large value with small effort, yet the response is "no, not now". I would have liked to have seen a response of "yes, we see the value and this would be very beneficial; we will investigate it and see where it could fall on the road map." It may only be perspective, but perspective is what the user base reacts to.

Thank you.

Just wanted to add that I'm very disappointed that this is not a feature and I agree that it does not need to greatly complicate the UI.

I know for myself, it is very important to define either the start date, end date, or duration of a project that can only be changed manually. Not having this functionality is extremely important and I wonder if your product development team is perhaps too focused on the software development type of project, rather than other types of projects?

I'm currently evaluating Wrike and my excitement evaporated - I need this feature. :( Workfront has this functionality, there has to be a way to fix dates that are not flexible?

Hi Katerina Malone, welcome to the Community!

Sorry for the late reply here! I've checked with the team again, and for now, there's no update from them regarding this suggestion. If you're still evaluating, please let me know if you have any questions or need help, I'll be happy to assist. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Same here, I am evaluating Wrike for our global production scheduling and the lack of this basic feature makes this tool unusable for us. I am very surprised that a fundamental feature like that is not supported. Selective locking on one of the 3 parameters (start, end, duration) for each task is an absolute must, how else do your customers work with big plans and many dependent tasks? Looking into other solutions now, 😢 very sad, I really liked it soo far. 

I'm sad to hear that you didn't find Wrike a good fit for your organization Merten Stroetzel! In Wrike, Collaborators can't change the start or end dates. There are also Access Roles available on Business and Enterprise subscriptions that can be used to limit access to changing dates for tasks and projects. On Enterprise subscriptions, it's possible to customize Access Roles too. Please let me know if you have any questions, I'll be happy to discuss 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Que mal que no pueda fijar cualquiera de los tres parametros, actualmente vi que wrike tiene la opcion de medir el avance de un proyecto tomando como base el numero de tareas y la duracion, pero tengo un problema ya que muchas veces tengo que mover la fecha de inicio y esto me cambia la duracion que habia puesto Ejem: 1h y me lo cambia a 2d, por tal razon no puedo utilizar el porcentaje de avance de los proyectos, esto me obliga a crear un informe, descargalo a excel y ahi hacer el ponderado que necesito entre la horas estimadas y la cantidad de tareas.

Bienvenidos a la comunidad, Levi Fernando Nuñez Gracias por compartir sus comentarios aquí, se transmitirán a nuestro equipo de productos.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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I'm a new customer on Wrike, and we're setting up the Key Projects where we need to fix the dates for each project/milestone. I know that Snapshot and comparison are available but locking the days is much easier for the Execs to keep track of the project without undergoing the comparison vs baseline.

Please add this feature as it's a necessity for weekly/monthly project reviews.

Welcome to the Community Maher Hajj Omar, thank you for letting us know your feedback! I'm passing it on to the team now 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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I notice in an older comment, it was noted that this is not being looked at because it would complicate the UI. Is this getting any more attention? This is a feature that we would find very useful in my organization. For example we have a manufacturing schedule we need to follow and we do not want the predecessors to be able to reschedule the manufacturing schedule. The only way i see around this is to create "Manufacturing start" milestones with the actual manufacturing task as its successor. This would create double the tasks and would be very inconvenient.   

Thank you for reaching out Matt WESTPHAL! Unfortunately, I don't currently have an update from the team regarding locking the dates. I'll keep checking for updates and passing the feedback here. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Come on Wrike, really?  The only reason we went with you over Asana, despite Asana having more integrations and generally being more broadly used was because you seemed to get that project management involved complex GANTT charts with lots of dependencies.  Not implementing this basic feature for over 2yrs definitely tests the credibility of our assumption.  Would be great to have this feature soon.

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us Sheldon Kimber! I'm now passing it on to our team. 

This suggestion is frequently brought to the Product team's attention, and I'll make sure to let you know here once I have an update from them regarding this idea.

Welcome to the Community 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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This would be a really great feature! I'm following!

Thank you for supporting this idea Riccardo Masullo! 🤗

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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+1

Got to this thread dealing with this issue today. It's our first month into Wrike and I'm surprised locking start dates, end dates, and durations is not available. This is basic Gantt chart functionality. According to Gantt principles tasks should have 8 types of constraints: 

1. As soon as possible – when you apply this constraint to an unlinked task, the start date of that task will be the same as the start date of the project. When this is applied to a dependent task, that task will start as soon as the dependency of its predecessor allow.

2. As late as possible – this is a flexible constraint which when applied to an unlinked task, will match its end date to the finish date of the entire project. If this is applied to a dependent task, the task will be scheduled to finish when its successor task has to start.

3. Start no earlier than – the task can start on or after the specified date

4. Start no later than – the tasks can start on or before the specified date

5. Finish no earlier than – the task has to finish on or after the specified date

6. Finish no later than – the task has to finish on or before a specified date

7. Must start on – the task has to start on the specified date

8. Must finish on – the task has to finish on the specified date

Constraints 7 and 8, which would involve locking start and end dates, would need to made possible in Wrike in order to have full project planning capabilities. This way, if a predecessor task experiences a delay and needs to be rescheduled, a constrained successor task could stay put and not automatically shift arbitrarily or unintentionally. If conflicts do occur, as can be expected, the interface could simply highlight the issue in a warning color as it already does and PMs could adjust accordingly.

As for duration it feels essential to be able to constrain durations for tasks that should only take a specific amount of time no matter how many times the dates shift. I already experienced issues with having to re-enter all of my task durations because I lost them several times when moving project dates.

These are basic principles of Gantt functionality and without them, I am concerned that that using Wrike for project planning will be challenging for us. In addition to this, we were in the midst of evaluating Wrike Integrate to connect with Google Calendar and our most desired integration recipe is now nearly impossible to deploy

Imagine our particular use case. We purchase the Wrike Integrate add-on and turn on a Google Cal integration that pushes and updates events on Google Cal as changes take place in Wrike. If I schedule all of my tasks with specific dates, mark their dependencies, and then pushed them to Google Cal, then any time I shift in a predecessor's date, all of its successor dates would shift (including those I would want to keep constrained - such as important meetings) and all of those tasks would additionally get shifted in my Google calendar causing project chaos. This would be really problematic, especially if clients have already accepted and confirmed meeting dates well into the future, as suddenly they receive dozens of meeting change requests from Google Cal due to the simple action of moving a task with a dependency in Wrike. 

Seeing as Wrike has so much potential otherwise and that this is such an essential feature I would imagine it would be higher on the priority list. Please enable this to make real Gantt project planning possible and turn what could potentially be an amazing Wrike integration with Google into a possibility.

Thanks a lot for providing such detailed feedback and examples, Stephanie Castilla! I'll be passing them on to our Product team. I also wanted to mention the Lead and Lag time that's available for task dependencies. I'm sure you know what it is, but just wanted to mention that some of the functionality that you cite is available in Wrike 😊

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Stephanie Castilla I agree with your detailed breakdown. Thank you for taking the time to submit a thorough post.

For us, we often wind up not linking tasks because of this. We can have tasks slide without affecting other tasks. Only where there are specific tasks that truly waterfall do we link them, knowing the impact and limitations in Wrike.

There is a start constraint which covers the "don't start until this date", but the lack of locking durations or dates is frustratingly limited. We have indeed experienced project schedules moving or adjusting without realizing what all changed due to one task being delayed.

Even when doing direct, simple editing of dates, the lack of the locks makes it difficult to be sure to adjust the task correctly. If I could lock the duration then when I change the start date I know the end date will be correct. But now, I often have to edit both dates to make sure it matches what I was intending.

I completely support and agree with the requests in this thread and hope that Wrike realizes that core PM and Gantt features are essential to having a proper product. There are several core functions that Wrike is missing.

Cansu Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager En savoir plus sur les fonctionalités et les meilleures pratiques grace à nos Webinaires online

Cansu Wrike Team member En savoir plus sur les fonctionalités et les meilleures pratiques grace à nos Webinaires online

This is yet another example of core functionality that Wrike refuses to address. There is a list of core features that the community has been requesting for multiple years which should be part of any proper Project Management solution that Wrike just continues to not acknowledge or address.

This is one of those items. We have been asking for it for over 3 years in this thread alone, and no movement from Wrike. We continue to get the same answer, "no plans for this". 

I understand that you base your priorities of development on the upvotes, but not everyone always sees or participates in a given thread. I doubt that most users even know about this particular thread. Many people just deal with the shortcomings and work around them the best they can. Only a few users take the time to post a needed feature request. I am willing to bet that if you were to actually survey the users about this feature request, and other core features that are lacking, you will get a very strong response. 

Just my opinion, but I am sure others share it as well. We get really tired of hearing "no" to basic functionality while at the same time there continues to be research and development and interviews with users for numerous other "improvements".

Thank you.

Jason Pontius We understand your sentiment here. Please rest assured that we've been passing your continued feedback here to our Product team as we always do. I'm sorry that this not being planned by the team is a disappointment for you. 

Just to clarify, the improvement that Cansu mentioned above that's being researched currently is the top voted Community suggestion on the Product Feedback forum. As you mention, the votes and comments are really important here, although the team looks at other factors as well. 

We will continue to keep this thread on our radar, and if there are any changes to the team's plans in relation to this suggestion, we'll make sure to let you know. Thank you again for the feedback you've shared here. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Hi Wrike team,

So far we love Wrike, great job on building a solid product. The one issue we have that is, unfortunately, a big enough issue to not make us not stick with it Wrike, is a lack of this feature.

If deadlines / milestones cannot be locked down, then timelines creep especially when new tasks are added. This causes deadlines to be missed.

We really need a feature that can 'freeze' the key deliverables.

Hi Jeff Alvarez, welcome to the Community 👋
Thanks a lot for supporting this idea! I'm sorry to hear that the lack of this functionality is an issue for your team. I'm passing your feedback to our Product team 👍 Please make sure to upvote the original post above if you haven't yet - the number of votes helps the team understand how popular the suggestion is. Here's more detail on that.
If you'd like to know what this Community has to offer, please check out our New to Community forum.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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