Dependencies

Hello,

I know there are 4 types of dependencies in Wrike, with SS and FS being the more common types of dependencies in the PM field. I am intrigued to learn more about how other project management professionals utilizes dependencies in their respected projects/organizations. Always looking for ways to adopt new methodologies to how my team uses dependencies and Wrike overall. Thanks!

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Maria Hermansen

I'm curious, so I'll follow! But also, which are the unmentioned dependencies? 👀
We're mostly using FS (and +X days) or FF, and dependencies are primarily used in the planning/ressource allocation process and then deleted so it won't mess around with the entire project or each individual's workload ✌️

Do you leave the dependencies active through the entire process, if so, how do you handle if task dates are changed and thereby change the plan for everyone's tasks following the changed task? 🤓

Glen Turpin

Alas, we do not use dependencies for most of our projects because we work on a high volume of quick projects and Wrike is insufficiently granular for that purpose. For example, we may have a project with dependencies but all the tasks have deadlines on the same day; some need to be completed in the morning before others can be completed in the afternoon before the whole project goes into a review that must be complete by EOB.

You can force Wrike to make it look right on a Gantt chart using FS-1 but it doesn't really make sense and confuses all of our users.

Sven Passinger

@Brandon Dunham we are working nearly only with FS and SS. For ordering of parts we use sometimes SF. So if you have a date when you need delivered something you get back with SF to the task before which is ordering of the part.

@Maria Hermansen we leave dependencies stable during the whole project time. We split our project into smaller parts via Milestones (milestones do not shift when the predecessor shifts). Si we are normaly working in layers for our projects. 1st Layer is the project itself. 2nd layer are milestones. This second layer we also report to management and customers. Below each milestone are tasks in 3rd and subtasks in following layer. These tasks are the work for this specific milestone. Inside the milestone dependency exists between tasks. And all tasks have to be predecessor of the milestone. All tasks following to the milestone do not have a dependency to the tasks in the milestone but to the milestone itself. So if you shift a task below the milestone the milestone will stay at the due date and not your whole project will shift. But what will happen you get a conflicht because if the tasks shifts so long, that you will miss your milestone date. So you can see it in Gantt with a redline and also in conflict monitor (unfortunatly a very bad tool, which needs improvement, but we have found a workaround). So the project manager can react on the problem (and a delayed task is a problem). He can then decide whether to shift the whole plan or if there are any other countermeasures.

Maria Hermansen

@Sven Passinger

Thank you so much for sharing!

I'm currently trying to rethink most of our setup to see if we can organize our Wrike account in a way that can provide ud with more data than currently as well as changing the ways we approach our projects. During this proces I've looked into Milestones, so I really appreciate your insights.

We currently structure our projects in a project (the client's case), project (the products in the case), task (the steps producing the product) structure.

How do you decide if a give task is a task or a subtask with the same milestone?

Just a couple of clarifying questions to make sure I understand:

do you set the predecessor on the first task within a milestone to be dependent on the previous milestone?
if not the above, do you "back track" through predecessors starting from the last task have the milestone as a predecessor to figure out when the tasks should be scheduled in order to reach the milestone? (based on effort and/or duration)

Sven Passinger

@Maria Hermansen

I just made a quick example. See in the screenshot. The second screenshot shows what happens if task 1 is delayed. This would be now simple to solve. MS1 would be shifted some days, but the project would be in time (MS2). But also speeding up Task 1 could be an alternative. Thats then up to the projectmanager.

If I have multiple tasks starting in a milestone you have to judge if they are depending on each other (then only connect one to the previuose milestone and all other with start-start to this one task or if they can all start independly after the previouse milestone connect each task to this milestone.

For me it is always the question when I make a project plan: which precondition must be fullfilled for a task. So I try to match the reality and the project plan. If you rebuild dependencies you have in reality in your plan this will help you a lot during the project.

Maria Hermansen

@Sven Passinger

Thank you so much for sharing! This is very insightful to me as well as inspiring - apologies for the quite late reply.

I'm definitely going to keep this as a key note for the rebuild in our account, and will be testing right away.