Leads and Lags with Dependencies

How does one add a lead or a lag to a dependency.

For instance, I have a SS dependency between task 1 (painting the cabinets) and task 2 (sealing the cabinets). Task 2 can start when task 1 starts, but two hours must elapse from the time the first cabinet is painted until the sealer can be applied (I have two people working, so it's not necessary to complete the painting of the cabinets before the sealer can start going on the ones that are dry).

So for task 2 it would look something like this for the dependency: 1SS+2h

How is this done in Wrike??

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Comments

Permanently deleted user

Hi Megan! Since scheduling is currently based on dates (and not time) in Wrike, this can be done with the help of Date Constraints. They indicate the earliest date a task can start, and after one is added, the task can't be rescheduled to a prior date. To add a constraint, switch to the Timeline View and reschedule the dependent task by dragging and dropping it to a different start date. Hope this helps!

Miriam Ivenshitz

Miriam Ivenshitz

Jan 16, 11:07 PM PST

I agree with Megan that this is one of the main things missing in Wrike. I understand that a constraint may be added to a start date, but then this option will not allow automatic date adjustment when the predecessor date changes.

Megan Caldwell

Thanks for your comment Miriam. Was trying to work through what was suggested above with the constraints and had the same problem - once the predecessor is updated, the date constraint may become inaccurate. Really hope that the Wrike team considers this. As well as subtask dates driving the parent task dates. That is a HUGE deal to many here on the community to be able to better use Wrike. You can vote on my post for this idea here: /hc/en-us/community/posts/115000153945-Allow-Subtasks-to-Update-Start-and-End-Dates-of-Parent-Tasks

Permanently deleted user

@Miriam, thank you for sharing your insight, this is really helpful.

@Megan, I appreciate that you created a new topic for this, thank you for posting the link here!

Miriam Ivenshitz

@Anastasia, do you think this will be implemented any time soon?

Permanently deleted user

@Miriam, this isn’t on our roadmap at the moment, but our Product Team looks at user feedback to learn about the functionality which is important to you, so it’s great to hear about this from you and Megan (and others).

M. Kuramoto

Lag option is really a missing feature in Wrike. I have just tried to add 3 days between two tasks but when I did that, Wrike understood that as a constraint (Wrike understood that the second task MUST start on the date I set).

If I understood well, for Wrike, if two tasks has a FS (finish to start) relation, the second task should start immediately when the first task finish (??). No option to add a gap between them?

The first two recommendation when someone learn MS Project is:

1) Set the start date and see the project finish date automatically according to the length and dependency of tasks

2) Avoid constraints (or better saying, use constraints if really necessary) because constraints could undermine recommendation #1

I noticed that Wrike moves tasks even with a constraint but it draw a vertical line indicating that there is a constraint. Is there an update about this missing feature?

Permanently deleted user

Thank you for commenting here and providing these details! While we aren't working on this yet, I think those suggestions are great, and since this request is popular I'm going to go ahead and move it to our new Product Feedback section. Other Community members will be able to add their votes there, as well as continue this discussion. This will be extremely useful for our Product Team. Thank you again for taking the time to share your thoughts about this functionality!

Brad Augustine

Agree with M. Kuramoto that this is a huge missing functionality. Our schedules have multiple instances when leads/lags are necessary and the schedules move quite frequently. Having the awareness of all manually scheduled lead/lags is not possible.

Permanently deleted user

Hi Brad, thanks for commenting here and sharing your insight!

Ralf Schwiede

Not being able to enter leads/lags is a huge disadvantage of Wrike. Leads/lags are required to be an all in PM solution. I hope this will be implemented soon.

James Bellamy

Plus one for lead and lags. I am just evaluating Wrike for my team, and this is a real negative point...

Stanislav Zemskov

No lag option, please add this functionality!

As a quick-win you can add another task called "Lag for certain task" and connect it between the tasks that you need to separate with a lag.

Or for Megan process this task will have a name "Drying lag" or "Cementing lag"

Lara Ortiz

Agreed! This has been one of our biggest issues onboarding Wrike in our organization. In training we were told every extra click costs the user 3 seconds. Without the lag functionality on projects with many steps that are 6-7 months long across a 200 person team, you can imagine how much lost productivity we experience manually fixing these dates.

Samantha Lee

I'm experiencing this now as I set up our templates. We may have several month gaps in between tasks being done, and some tasks NEED dependencies but don't necessarily have a due date. This is definitely a HUGE disadvantage as when I'm putting in my dependencies, I must drag the task back to the original date I had set instead of the day after the first task is completed.

Paul Elo

We are also very interested in this functionality (adding a lead or lag time between dependent tasks). The workaround of adding a lag task is quite cumbersome. Thank you.

Anthony Jackson

The absence of lead and lags is pretty much a basic functionality of a PM tool. I can not understand why this is not on the product road map. All my projects have a requirement for this. So while I really like Wrike I am not sure I can use it effectively to manage my projects. I will have another review and see if I can come up with a work around but if I can't I will need to move to another solution.

grove matsuoka

Thank you for this thread. We have been evaluating Wrike for our company's enterprise PM system. The lack of easy lag dependency linking is a show stopper and I will now move on to evaluate other PM systems... unless Wrike will be rolling out a new version in the next 30 days that has this feature.

Curtis Proctor

+1 for adding Leads and Lags. I was very surprised that this feature was not already in here as it is a very critical part of any project. While we can add task "placeholders" for the time being, that is very cumbersome and as someone mentioned, time consuming to add in every single spot that you need a lead/lag. This is a very simple thing to code, please add this feature asap.

Gerrit Coetzee

I need this as well.

Eric Wood

Missing Lead/Lag and auto adjust of parent task duration will likely be a non-starter for us to use this tool moving forward.

Permanently deleted user

Hi all, thanks for your continued votes and input here. If and when I have any updates to this, we'll be sure to post here. Thanks 👍

David Tribble

Me too me too. Luckily my project with lags can support adding "lag tasks" this time. Please - lead/lag times!

Carrie MacLean

Leads and lags are CRITICAL in project planning! This would be a deal breaker for my organization in using Wrike.

Andy Pierce

One more vote. Frankly after reading through all the previous votes I'm falling out of the honeymoon phase. I think the Product Team from Wrike needs to comment immediately that this is on the roadmap and is the process of being scheduled.

Any project planning tool worth its weight would have Leads and Lags and wouldn't be forcing users to create dummy tasks between real work items.

This is on you, Wrike.

Stephanie Westbrook

Hi everyone, we recently released the new Timeline, and the team has included lead and lag times as improvements that they want to make to the view. We still don't have dates to share, but I wanted to let you know that it is something that they are planning. You can see more planned next steps for the Timeline View on our Changing to the New Timeline page.

Andy Pierce

WOOT! Way to go! 🙌

Jennifer Olvera

Any updates on this feature? Excited to add this finally to our very large multi-step projects.

Permanently deleted user

Hey Jennifer, this is something our Product Team is looking into at the moment. I have no concrete dates to share, but make sure to click 'follow' on this thread and I'll provide updates as I have them 🙂

Matthew Finley

I know this is in the works, but wanted to add in my vote.

We are a machine build shop and this functionality is very important to us.

My real world example:

Machine Build can start once SOME parts are machined, do not have to wait for ALL parts to be machined. Same with wiring panels, programming etc. Many tasks rely on each other but do not necessarily have to be complete for the next to start.

Adding tasks just to build in this lag is cumbersome and a waste of time.