Re: Planner-list predecessors for fixed date tasks

[Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com>]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 5:42 AM, pete davidson <caitifty gmail com> 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.

-- 
Alexandre Franke