Hi @scott harvey great question! PS welcome to the community! If I’m understanding correctly you’d like to have a task start no earlier than a specific date.

This comes in handy if there is a task in your onboarding template like Week 1 check-in, 90 day Training or other tasks that are dependent on dates not on the completion of another task/milestone/task group.

For date dependent tasks what you’ll need to do is:

1. Remove the dependency you have in place
2. Set a start date. That new start date will act as the new dependency. 

Does that help answer your question?

Yes, that helps.  I will set this up in a test project and give it a try.  

Thank you!

@scott harvey just curious, what’s your use case for this? 

@scott harvey There is a backlog item i’ve been tracking called “dependency options”

It hopefully will address our highest priority request for the Guide team - the ability to have multiple dependencies (X starts when the latest of ABC finished) and the ability to run lag time before a specific task kicks off. I’d definitely suggest going to that backlog item and adding your desire for true Project Management scheduling capabilities (early Start, Late start, tracking float in schedules, etc) as I think it could take this tool to the next level.

@JustaCSM - while “early start” restrictions don’t apply to my company’s workflows, the general concept is as follows. Here is a sample project plan:

Task A - Start Day 1, 5 days duration

Task B - Start Day 6, 5 days duration

Task C - Start Day 11, 5 days duration

Task D - Start Day 16, 10 days duration

In a current GuideCX Project, if Tasks A/B/C are done in record time (1 day per), you could start Task D on Day 4. 

Setting an “early start” on a task is generally needed when outside factors prohibit work starting any earlier than the predetermined date. Think Construction permit is not valid until X, materials aren’y delivered until Y, labor resources are booked up until Z… It’s a restriction on starting early, not a hard start date.

If Task D has an early start of Day 16, even if Task A/B/C are done in 7 days total, the project is on a holding pattern until Day 16. All dependencies are met, and Task D kicks off on Day 16 as planned. If Task A/B/C are done in 21 days, since we’ve passed the early start date, Task D starts day 22 and runs for normal 10 days. 

if you keep going, there are also Late Starts (can start early, but not later than , and as a result there is float in a schedule that can be calculated and tracked… it’s a rabbit hole you can lose yourself in!

In the world of MS Project you can think of the features requested as the “start no sooner than” and “start no later than”  constraints that can be associated with a project task.  In situations where execution of an implementation is dependent on scheduled resources, such as a network engineer, this would allow my team to schedule the event with dependencies that predecessor tasks are complete and for the date the internal resource is available.