Target Dates
Anticipated start and finish for
The flexibility of LeanCPM allows users to display tasks as starting and finishing on any date they choose.
Minimum requirement
Tasks must be in a valid dependency path to enable Target Dates.
Target Start
The date the user expects the task to start.
Target Finish
When the task is Not Started, this is calculated as Expected Start + Duration.
When the task is Started, it’s calculated as the Actual Start + Duration
When Target dates lock
There are a few situations for a task when its target start date is locked and cannot be changed:
- When the task is started, finished, or completed.
- When all of the task’s blockers are cleared
No blockers
If an unstarted task has no blockers (cleared or not), its Target Start will be set to the current date.
The most common way to set a project’s first task is to attach it to a Milestone first.
A task’s target dates can be unlocked by simply adding a milestone, an un-started task, or an uncleared issue as a blocker.
Expected Finish
In legacy CPM, there is an “Expected Finish” field that can be changed after a task has started to help calculate the Remaining Duration. There is no concept of “Expected Finish” in Lean CPM; instead, we use Ai-nticipated Dates.
Target vs Planned
Legacy CPM has a concept of Planned, or Original dates, which is the same as the Early Dates but is frozen once the activity has started. This is beneficial because it shows us how late an activity started based on the last schedule update in which it hadn’t started yet.
However, there are a few shortcomings: first is we assume that activities should
This should go a step further, as it doesn’t capture the true essence of how late tasks start.