Planned Project Dates not working as expected.

[Bob20]

I'm puzzled by how ServiceNow handles planned dates in projects... The math and how dates relate to tasks is understood. What I do not understand is the philosophy of why planned dates change at all. If I have a project in MS project, build my tasks, set my baseline, the planned dates remain the same as I progress through the project. The planned dates are locked and used for deviation. In ServiceNow, if I have a project with a planned end date of May 31 and my last task runs late, the planned end date of the task and the project is pushed back, losing the deviation information.... Or am I thinking about this incorrectly?

Also if I have a task and the work has been completed and I'm a bit late closing the task in SN, when use the calendar setting the Actual End Date, and I set the task as Closed Complete, I would expect that the Actual Closed Date to be the one I set, not the date (today's date) when I clicked "Update" on the Task record. For example, If I had a task with an Actual Start Date of April 1 and a Planned End Date of April 7, and the Actual Completed Date is April 8, but I do not get a chance to update my Task record as closed until April 12, then, even if I set the Closed Date to April 8, the Actual Close Date is reset to April 12. This is somewhat unexpected behavior. When I set the date with the calendar, that's the date SN should use for the Closed Date field (then check if it's valid).

Thanks for your input.

[morry]

I also have questions with the planned dates. I've looked at how the dates are calculated and somewhat understand the difference between manual and automatic calculation. However, with a manual calculated projected, it would seem that the system would not change the dates. Basically, our requirement would be that when it's a manual project, don't change planned start and ending dates; and child tasks should not change parent task dates.

Additionally, how do we allow 24/7 dates and eliminate the minutes & seconds on the dates. We aren't actively in ServiceNow when we complete the tasks and many of the tasks we perform are not within the standard 8-5 window. We also don't care about the minute or second a task was completed, so causes extra work to fill that information into the system.

I'm attending Knowledge 17 and plan on speaking with the Project experts on this as well.

[Earl L]

Morris,

I can answer one of your questions, about date/time display. I've looked at this quite a bit. All of the dates that we're talking about (planned and actual) are using the ServiceNow Date/Time column type. These columns always display the date and time. As far as I know there is no easy fix (like a system preference setting) to change the display of those columns to just show the date.

You could probably, with some effort, coerce the display to show what you want with some code. It might be easier than I'm thinking, but from my point of view it would be pretty tedious to do for each of the date/time columns that you might want to control in this way. I looked at it, just for reporting, and decided not to pursue it because it was pretty messy.

Another tidbit, in case you don't know about it, is that ServiceNow also has a Date column type, which does not include the time. Unfortunately, I don't believe there would be an easy (or any) way to convert the existing columns to use the date only column type.

Earl