Re: Planner-list predecessors for fixed date tasks

Hello Pete,

I'm not sure to understand, but my comment could help.

if you have a "Deadline" task  for a part of your project (including, 
for exemple, task A)
 - you can set "Deadline" task as a fixed date milestone
 - of course you can't set any predecessor for this fixed date task
 - so you can't set A as predecessor (for example "end to start" link) 
for "Deadline" task, but...
 - you can set "Deadline" task as predecessor (same example ; "start to 
end" link) of A

limits for this example :
 - even if A is an "as soon as possible" task, it will be scheduled to 
"the last moment" before "Deadline". why ? we just wan't it to become a 
"not after" task.
 - you can't anticipate A setting it to fixed date (today for example). 
why ?
 - you can't set any other predecessor to A (a current task ending 
tomorrow, linked "end to start", for example), even if A has been 
scheduled on next year. why ?

I agree that external constraints are decisive in project scheduling and 
that Planner constraints rules are too much restrictive.
but it's not an easy problem, and coding realy accurate rules could be 
an infinite task.

so just try to use such links with parsimony

Regards,
Ricardo FERNANDEZ


------------------------------------------------------------------------
*De : * Alexandre Franke <[email protected]>
*Envoyé : * 25/10/2009 13:14:00 +0100
*À : * planner <[email protected]>
*Objet : * Planner-list predecessors for fixed date tasks

> On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 5:42 AM, pete davidson <[email protected]> wrote:
>   
>> Hi all
>>     
>
> Hi,
>
>   
>> I'm trying to use Planner to manage academic grant applications.  As such,
>> there's a number of key tasks whose dates are externally set and
>> non-negotiable (such as the date the grant must be submitted to the funding
>> agency, or the date a letter of intent is due to the funding agency).  I've
>> been 'locking' these dates by creating a milestone task (eg "Submit grant")
>> with a schedule of 'on fixed date' on the required date.
>>
>> The problem I'm having is when I try and link these milestone tasks to the
>> rest of the tasks in the project by setting a predecessor.  This produces
>> the error "You cannot add a relationship to a task with a Must Start On
>> constraint."  I've also tried using a one-day task instead of a milestone
>> task, but get the same error.
>>     
>
> The problem here is with the meaning of the predecessor relationship.
> If you set A as a predecessor of B, it means that you cannot start
> working on B until A is done. So what would happen if you start A on
> oct 26th, need 4 days to finish it and set B on oct 28th (fixed date)?
> That wouldn't make any sense because you'd need to work on B but you
> couldn't since A isn't done yet.
>
> This has nothing to do with the fact that it's a milestone.
>
>   
>> Is there another approach to dealing with externally set fixed dates that
>> I'm missing, or a way to set milestone tasks which allows linking to other
>> tasks?
>>     
>
> You can do it without the predecessor relationship, I think it's the
> way that would make the most sense.
>
>

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