Purpose of original start/end date project/project tasks

[CGS92]

Dear Community, 

Is anyone familiar with the purpose and logic behind the 'original start/end date' on project/project tasks?

The docs state that the original dates are the planned start date of the first child (project) task and the planned end date of the last child task. 

However, i have done some testing myself. And does not seem as straight forward as stated in the docs.

- When a project is created the original dates are copied form the planned start/end of the project itself.

- With the creation of project tasks, indeed the original dates are updated with the planned dates of the first/last project task. 

This way the planned and original dates are always equal, so what is the purpose?

With the project property 'Roll up project start date from tasks' set to false, the original start date stays equal to the project planned start date not the task planned start date. Now a PM can freely play around with its project task planning without altering the original start date of the project. Which seems handy. 

However, what i am also wondering.. I come across projects with the original end date not equal to the planned end date of the project/last project task? What is the logic behind this?

Thanks in advance, 

Colin 

[nilesh_gupta · Accepted solution]

Hi Colin,

Purpose  of original start date and original end date  is to store planned dates when project  was planned. Basically when project  state was in pending  or  open state. 

When project is finalized with defined tasks and dependency. you will see that all original dates and planned dates are in sync for project tasks and project. Since its not started yet.

Now people start working on the project tasks assigned to them and then they start moving state to work in progress. At this time they will fill actual start date. Populating of actual start date  will automatically recalculate planned end date of task  to new planned end  date, if actual start date is  not same as planned start date.

So as I said, populating of actual dates changes planned end date of current tasks and some times planned start date of successor task.  So how will we know what was old planned dates, So to store that information we created  original dates and by looking  into original dates you will be able to know what was the date when project was in pending state.

Thanks,

Nilesh

[daniziz]

Hi Nilesh,

I've created several proyects with tasks and I'm unable to see the difference between Planned and Original dates sinces ServiceNow calculate them as the same.

Here is my procedure:

Create new proyect (State Pending, phase Initiating)

Move it to (State Open, phase Planning)

Create tasks with dates and dependencies.

Move it to (State Work in Progress, phase Executing)

I close my tasks in order, with fictional ending dates bigger than planned in order to increase proyect duration.

When I close my last task, the project automatically changes to State Closed, so I select phase Closing.

Here are the dates:

And here are the tasks:

What am I doing wrong?

regards,

Daniel.

[Arturo Guieb]

Did you ever get a solution to this.   We are having the same problem where the Planned Dates and Original Dates is always the same

[Louis Savalli]

Did you ever get a solution?  Same issue here.  I'm not understanding the purpose of original dates if they're constantly recalculating.