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Agreed lags are not the best way to do this (as I said before). For an alternative, you could relink phase 1 to phase 2 to phase 3, and then set the constraints on all phase 1 tasks to "as late as possible". This would mean that phase 2 to phase 3 would be a normal dependency (occurring one after the other), while the constraint would push phase 1 to its latest possible start, which would be controlled by the phase 2 date.

Its probably easier to do than to explain, give it a try and see if it gives a better result

Many many thanks for all your help! I ll give it a try!

Hello Guloluseus and happy new year!

I followed your recommendations and I ve placed all my 'phase 1' tasks with constraint "as late as possible" and I am getting slightly better results.

In the attached mpp for example, if I change the start date of my phase 2 task in line 8 for example, then indeed I can see the whole summary task been shifted left or right. The other two summary tasks (line 12 and 22) also shift though and I do not understand why... I did not declare any dependency between them.

In any case, I guess that with this approach this means that I will have to manually change the phase 2 start date of the hundreds tasks I have. Correct? This is gonna be difficult for me..

What I am trying to do is to "link" the phase 2 tasks of ALL my summary tasks with a milestone called 'PICK UP DATE' so I would only have to move the milestone and the respective linked tasks would be adjusted automatically. I would like all phase 2 tasks (i.e. lines 7, 17, 27) to start at the same time. This means that depending the duration of phase 1, some summary tasks should start sooner than others.

I am still struggling with the dependency of this one, let me know if you can help! How could I link a milestone to my phase 2 tasks without messing with the sequential sequence of my tasks? Adding multiple dependencies in phase 2 task, makes things worse I think..

Regards
Nantia

Attached Files

nantia_problem1.zip (492.3 KB, 11 views)