Tip of the Week - Schedule grid dates vs custom field dates
When should I use a custom field to track a date vs. tracking the date in the schedule grid?
This is a question that often comes up. There are typically many dates that need to be tracked in a project. However, in BigWave, only dates that need to be watched for milestone and tracking purposes should be tracked in your schedule. A good rule of thumb is if the date is important enough that if “missed”, then you need to know about it, then that is a milestone you will want to track as part of your WBS in the schedule grid. All of the BigWave reporting/alerting functionality works around dates in the WBS, so any dates captured in a custom field will not be scanned by BigWave for this purpose.
Let’s take an example. For our project we must deliver documentation for each site worked. We want to track the fact that documentation was indeed delivered and what the date was for when that occurred.
If we want to put this “Documentation Delivered” date into our project plan, then it would fall somewhere towards the end of the WBS for the site and we could track a schedule date and actual date for this event occurring. This is workable when we can actually schedule the date for when the documentation will be delivered.
However this example is different. The site documentation comes from many different sources several of which we don’t have direct control on when we will receive it. Our job is to compile it all and forward it to the customer. Since it is difficult to give this event a “scheduled date”, we simply choose to create a custom field that will hold the actual date when the documentation is actually delivered.
Typically it is fairly obvious when a date falls into the schedule, but sometimes a date needs to be tracked and only its value is significant as a data point. In these cases a custom field is the better choice.
Written by John Livermore - Multi-site Project Management
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