Work Schedules (Vacation Days) and Project Timelines - Ways to lock in timelines on certain projects?

For the most part, we really appreciate the work schedule feature in Wrike. Users will add their vacation time, and project timelines are automatically adjusted. The majority of our projects don't have hard deadlines, so it's OK for them to be pushed out a few days.

We do however, have some projects that have strict launch dates that cannot be moved. Is there some way around the work schedule feature from pushing these specific project timelines out when a user adds vacation time to work schedule?

I'm aware of the wrike labs "Disable automatic task rescheduling" option, however I have not enabled it because as mentioned above, the majority of projects this feature is super helpful for.

I've searched the community for workarounds and am not finding anything recent, much of the conversations around work schedules happened several years ago.

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Ali Moses

Rob, is it necessary that these items be projects? With tasks, you can convert them to milestones that then won't be adjusted by user time info.

Rob Gorczyca

The tasks being adjusted are within projects. So the entire timeline of some projects are altered when a user enters in their work schedule vacation time.

Are you saying, if we convert a task to a Milestone, it will freeze and not move when a work schedule vacation is added?

Ali Moses

I believe so. I don't think you can use milestones with projects, but you can use them with tasks for sure. It would be worth some testing at least.

Rob Gorczyca

@Ali Moses - I did a test, where I set the launch date as a Milestone. I added my work schedule vacation time and while it kept the launch date locked in, the rest of the tasks adjusted to beyond the actual launch date.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work, though it seems that it should adjust the other tasks accordingly by reducing the number of days to keep the rest of the schedule intact, coinciding with the locked in launch date.

Ali Moses

Bummer!

Ali Moses

Did you try making the parent item a task instead of a project and converting THAT to a milestone?

Rob Gorczyca

@Ali Moses - Yes, I'm only referring to main tasks within a project, not subtasks. I made the "launch" task a milestone. The launch task date remained the same, but all of the predecessor task dates were pushed out, beyond the launch task date when a work schedule vacation was added.

I'm guessing that with Wrike you either use the reschedule task work schedule feature, or don't use it. It seems with our projects though, it is super helpful for many of our projects, but the projects that have a hard deadline, it can screw up timelines.

Rob Gorczyca

@Elizaveta Bogdanova - checking to see if you have any insight on this one. My gut tells me that what I'm asking for doesn't exist in Wrike. So our options are to either use Work Schedules and deal with the task timelines being bumped or don't use it at all. I understand that we could use the labs feature "Disable automatic task rescheduling" however that would put us back to where we started, with tasks being assigned to people during their time off work.

Thoughts?

Rohan V

Hi @Rob Gorczyca 👋

As you mentioned, the "Disable automatic task rescheduling" option is available as of today, and I believe this won’t be helpful for your use case. For now, I will be moving this post from the "How to" to the "Product Feedback" section so that your suggestion can be passed on to our Product Feedback team 👍

Steve Mruskovic

Hi @Rob Gorczyca I have the exact same scenario as you. The only workaround I have is a policy one. If someone is to put vacation time in Wrike, they are instructed to first co-assign the task to another team member that will be in office during the task in question's duration. This at least prevents rescheduling, while making sure there are eyes on a project with a critical timeline. Hope this gives you food for thought!

Rob Gorczyca

@Steve Mruskovic - This is a fantastic idea that I hadn't thought of. This would prevent projects from being paused due to vacations and could keep things moving forward. Appreciate the tip!

Charlotte Wicht

I'm experiencing the same issue as others have mentioned. To address it, I'm considering testing the lab option with a custom protocol.
Meanwhile, we're working on developing an API that will allow us to import .ics files generated when users record a day off in our company system. The goal is to:

Automatically register time off after a work check.
Highlight tasks that fall during the user's absence.
Allow the user to review affected tasks and, if necessary, consult the project manager to either reschedule or reassign the task.

Until the API is ready, I've created a dashboard with two widgets (for tasks and assigned projects). However, users have to manually change the time frame in each widget's settings, as we can't set this as a global parameter for the entire dashboard. This extra step requires two manual actions per widget, and I'm concerned that users might forget or avoid doing it.

I know that some people will not be happy with this enable the non rescheduling tasks But as @Rob Gorczyca some project can not be changed.
Has anyone implemented a similar solution or found a way to automate this better? Any tips are appreciated!