Any suggestions on what we can do to make the planned duration field editable or is it best practice not to be able to edit this field?

[Hernan3]

I enabled the ‘Enable altering of planned date(s) for task in WIP/Closed’ option in our test instance and now I can edit the Planned Start Date on projects, which also updates the Project Planned End Date automatically. However, the Planned duration field is locked down by an ACL. We are wanting to be able to edit the Planned duration field when creating a project (with child tasks) from a template.

During the beginning of my research, I was thinking maybe the solution was to edit the template to use manual calculation instead of automatic. However, I’ve read a few documents in Docs.ServiceNow.com that says projects with one or more tasks cannot be converted to manual calculation.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what we can do to make the planned duration field editable or is it best practice not to be able to edit this field?

[komalg]

Hi Herman,

ServiceNow Project -> Date section works in following way.

• When a Project/ Project task has child Project Tasks - Planned End Date and Duration are calculated fields and MUST remain READONLY
• When there is no child project task, duration is editable and planned start date, planned end date and duration works in synch to each with help of on-change client script

Hence it is recommended to use system as above.

Please see below examples

Non-Editable duration

editable duration

Please mark Correct/ Helpful is works for you.

Best,

Komal

[Sagar Patro]

Hey,

We had the similar question a few months back for Release Management(Enhancement and tasks). We overrode the ACL for the Planned end date to editable and planned duration to make it read-only. The planned duration was locked out just to have better control.

It works great. No issues encountered as of today.

To make the planned duration correct, we wrote a script to update on the update of Planned End Date.

Just to state the logic:

If the Actual start date is empty

Planned duration = diff(Planned Start date  - Planned End date)

else

Planned duration = diff(Actual Start date - Planned end date)

For Project there could be few things, you should be aware of,

1. Make sure you check the roll-ups and roll downs for Project and project tasks. Very IMPORTANT.
2. Check the project completion percent fields if you care for it.

Good Luck!

Mark it as Correct and Helpful based on the impact of the response.

[ettawilson]

May I ask, why do you want to edit the planned duration of the parent?  The planned duration of the parent is calculated from the child tasks.   If I have 5 child tasks, each 5 days then the parent task will be 25 days.  Let the duration of the child tasks determine the duration of the parent.  Same applies to planned effort as well.

Additionally, you can control your planned start and planned end by updating the planned duration of the child tasks. Try not to constraint the dates. If you schedule using critical path and your project dates move, you will only need to adjust the duration of the impacted tasks to get back on track and not have to update every constraint tasks.