Hello,
For most simple projects the dependencies in Projects works well.
- A task takes longer/shorter then planned and impacts all subsequent tasks
- Answering what-if scenarios, like adding additional resources or if there is a project delay
Projects can accommodate the above. However, most of our project schedules can get complex and that is where Projects dependencies falls short in a couple of areas.
- Ability to add a lag time to the dependency so that it is tied to the completion date of the predecessor but start a given amount of time before the end or after the end. In the case of a negative lag, this allows overlapping of tasks that are dependent but not necessarily dependent on the completion.
- Scheduling the completion date of a task to finish the same time as another task. A Finish to Finish dependency allows dependent tasks that must complete at the same time but have different durations.
We use both of these quite extensively in our project scheduling and without them it will cause of lot of extra work for our Project Mangers to manually schedule many of the tasks without using dependencies.
Regards,
Ron