Purpose of original start/end date project/project tasks

CGS92 · ‎05-22-2019

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 · ‎05-22-2019

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

View solution in original post

brandonmartel · ‎04-30-2025

There is a system property com.snc.project.sync_original_dates_with_planned_dates that is set to True by default. There is a business rule(Update Planned from Current) that is triggered on that property being set to true that makes the original date match the planned date. I found by setting this to false, once a Project/Enhancement is set to Work in Progress or higher the original dates are no longer updated.