Our team is running into challenges with dependencies, hard deadlines, and workload planning. Dependencies are extremely helpful for managing our schedules, but we have certain tasks with true, immovable deadlines. When upstream work shifts, we need a way to designate certain dates as protected, locked, or “no push” so they cannot automatically be moved by dependencies.
Milestones initially seemed like a good way to identify these hard deadlines. However, milestones cannot have effort assigned to them, which creates another challenge: we lose the ability to accurately balance the team's workload.
For example, we may have a deliverable that:
- Must be completed on a specific date
- Requires several hours of actual work
- Needs to be reflected in the assignee’s workload/capacity
- Cannot automatically move because an upstream dependency changes
Currently, it feels like we have to choose between protecting the deadline and accurately representing the effort required to meet it.
A few potential solutions that would help:
- Protected or “no push” dates on regular tasks: Allow a task to retain its effort while its start date, due date, or both are protected from dependency-driven rescheduling. If another task creates a scheduling conflict, Wrike could flag it rather than automatically move the protected date.
- Allow effort on milestones: If milestones are intended to represent firm dates that should not move, allowing an effort value to be associated with them would make them much more useful for workload and capacity planning. A milestone may represent a single deadline, but an assignee may still need several hours of work to meet it.
