How Dates Calculate with Project Insight Intelligent Scheduling

Short video shows how dates are automatically calculated with the Intelligent Scheduling features of Project Insight.

Transcript:

Today, I am going to talk about how dates are set automatically in Project Insight using the intelligent scheduling feature.

Let's create a new task. We will give it five days and save it. The date is automatically set to one of two dates: either today's date, which is the 26th of February, or the project start date. This is determined by whichever of these two dates is later. The reason for this is that when a project has already started and you want to add a new task, you do not want to manually set the date every time. Therefore, it will set the date for today, which happens to be later than the project start date.

You can change this by clicking on the task to edit it. Go to the leftmost column and click the task options button. As you can see under "Constraint Type," the default is "ASAP after task created date." This constraint is what causes the date to automatically be set to today.

We can change this. We can say "ASAP after project start." Save the task, and as you can see, it defaults to the project start date, which is the 17th of February.

Another way that tasks get their dates automatically set is when you create a predecessor for that task. So, we can create a predecessor for this new task. Click "Edit," then "Predecessors." We will say the predecessor task for the new task is "Predecessor Task" under "Summary Task 2." We will click "Save Task," and as you can see, the new task begins on the 25th, which is the same day that the predecessor task ends. You'll also notice that when I did this, the summary task changed its dates. This is because summary tasks receive their dates from their child tasks. However, summary tasks can also be used to change the schedule if they have a predecessor that forces them forward. This generally isn't recommended, as it's not a Project Management Institute (PMI) standard, but you can still do it.

Another way that a task can have its dates changed is if you manually change the date. So, for this, we'll click on the new task to edit it, and then we'll change the start date to, let's say, April 25th rather than March 25th. We will have it end on May 1st rather than April 1st. We will click "Save," and if we go into the constraints on this, we will see that the constraint type changed to "Must Start On" because we manually set the date. However, if I change this constraint type back to the default, which is "After Task Created Date," we can see that it returns to following its predecessor task.

To summarize, when you set a task, by default its date is set to either the project start date or today's date, whichever is later. Predecessors push the schedule into the future. You can add manual constraints, such as setting the task to start on a specific date. Summary tasks can push other tasks, but we do not recommend it. And that is how intelligent scheduling works in Project Insight.