How to set task to AS LATE AS POSSIBLE

Hi! I'm building a process and I have some tasks that are not on a critical path, which I want to be completed AS LATE AS POSSIBLE within the process, not to create waste. How do I set this up in Wrike?
In Microsoft Project it was possible to set this "rule" for each task, but in Wrike I cannot find this feature.
Thank you!

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Comments

Ali Moses

@Anna Bushnaya Do you have other tasks in the process that need to come before these low priority tasks? Could you set the dependency such that the beginning of the low priority tasks align with the end of any earlier task? Alternately, you could set the importance as "low" and just have the users sort by highest importance.

Anna Bushnaya

Hi Ali, thanks for your reply!

These tasks are indeed connected to something else, but as those steps are not on the critical path, the whole chain now has too early deadline.

I'm trying to set it so the orders for components are placed as late as possible so we don't generate waste and have them laying around in the inventory.

At the moment all components are set to be bought at the same time, but what is as component leadtime is all different, they will then arrive all in different time, while what I'd want is that they all arrive at the same time, but then the order is placed accordingly to when arrival is needed.

The only way how I can think of to set it up now, is to change dependencies to order arrival instead and mark it as FF or SF. But thats not ideal, as I can't connect it to earlier steps then.

Ali Moses

Hmm. I'm wondering if you can take advantage of the new automations that affect start and due dates. Like maybe you could set your due date as when you need the items to arrive and then use an automation, based on the type of part being ordered, that subtracts a given number of days from that date and makes it the start date? Have you checked out this help article? https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/29705036419095-Using-Formulas-in-Wrike-Automation

Basudha Sakshyarika

Great suggestions, @Ali Moses! 😊

@Anna Bushnaya, in addition to what Ali has already suggested—setting the correct Importance and using date management Automations to adjust start or due dates—you can also use Custom Fields to track and manage task priorities and scheduling preferences. Furthermore, Dashboards can be set up to monitor tasks that are scheduled to start later, ensuring they are not started prematurely. Hope this helps! 👍🏽

Laurin Preston

I agree with Anna here. While some of your proposed solutions may solve this, it really seems to be a roundabout way of fixing the actual issue. Wrike SHOULD have the ability to schedule a task AS LATE AS POSSIBLE, without affecting the subsequent task. All it would do would be shift your line item "right" in the schedule as far as it can go until it hits the next item in line. As it sits, I have to manually move them around and it's simply not tenable. The standard scheduling software programs that I've used, MS Project and Primavera, have this functionality. This is a common PM practice when trying to determine drop dead dates so that you know when you need to act to avoid affecting your critical path. As a baseline, you'd add in more float if necessary as a larger buffer.

Anna Bushnaya

Thank you everyone for your suggestions!

We are in the process of deployment of Wrike in my org, and we had a consultant looking in our case, we concluded that what we are looking for is not possible to achieve with current Wrike functionality. We'll be trying again in few days with product manager, but seems unlikely we'll find something easy to implement.

I totally agree with Laurin, for me "As late as possible" functionality is basics of scheduling, and all the other softwares have it. Seems like we'll end up moving tasks manually as well.

Basudha Sakshyarika

Thank you for sharing your feedback on this, Laurin and Anna. 🙏🏼

I have shared it with our product team. I would suggest posting this on our Product Feedback forum for better visibility and feedback from other community members. Thank you! 😊

Dave Merriman

Wrike team - any updates on "as late as possible" functionality? This is a basic feature that I would expect any project management software to have, and this is a huge miss by Wrike.

Rohan V

Hi @Dave Merriman, welcome to the Community, and thank you for reaching out and sharing your honest feedback with us! 🙌

Unfortunately, there aren’t any new updates on this feature at the moment. As Basudha mentioned in the comment above, you can create a post in our Product Feedback forum. Users looking for similar functionality can upvote your post, and it reaches our responsible team.

You can read more about our product feedback guidelines in this post for additional information.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding!

Robert Slazas

Also agree. What we're looking for here is the option to shift the dates of a task that has slack time to where it has no slack time. This type of feature is based on the "slack time" metric. If Wrike were to implement that then you could easily make a rule to do this.