Controlling End Date on Tasks

Project plans in OpenAir are made up of phases and tasks to manage both budget and schedule of the engagement. The task form in OpenAir defaults to have a start date available and support predecessors to link tasks together. This allows start dates on tasks to automatically calculate based on planned hours/effort and the end dates of predecessors. End dates are automatically computed to assigned resources being leveraged 100%, but this may not be the case for all tasks. As a project manager, you may want to drive the end date by controlling user assignment %.

An End Date field can be added to tasks to allow the setting of a strict end date which will force OpenAir to compute user assignment % per day. To add the end date, you will need to email OpenAir support to request End Date activation on the task. Once activated, the End Date field will appear on tasks and may be set manually by Project manager to ensure accurate start date computation for any tasks linked together.

One word of caution – if no planned hours are associated to the task, any values entered into the end date field will not be saved. Without planned hours (work effort) to drive an effort window for a task, the end date field cannot be set to any date other than the start date.