Table of Contents

Durations

Each task created from a project template in Wrike carry with them a default, or assumed, Duration. Durations are the amount of business days it is assumed that it will take to complete a task. Or in other words, the amount of business days of the time between the start date and the due date of a task.

Updating the duration of a task will be important especially when there is an anticipated change, either more or less, in the amount of work that will be needed to complete a specific task during the development of a project. By updating the duration accordingly, this will automatically adjust the dates of the given task, and will then (because of the dependency chains within Wrike projects) update the dates of all subsequent tasks accordingly as well.

Duration Use/Meaning

As mentioned above, the duration of a task is the amount of business days it will take to complete (from start date to due date) a task/project. Any task that has dates associated with it will have a duration, and adjustments to either the date or duration will have an equal impact on the other, we will cover this more below.

Initial durations for tasks contained in the project template are approximations derived from collected opinions and experience from a number of different production personnel depending on the type of work the task is in reference to. All of these tasks should be taken as approximations and not hard and fast rules to live by once work has started on an individual program/course project.

Tip: The duration for the "Bucket" level tasks are an aggregation of all the durations of the subtasks beneath it. In the above example, the bucket tasks are the "ABC106 - Non-Video Assets" and "ABC106 - Video" tasks.

Changing Durations

Changing durations can be done by either editing the duration field value directly, or by adjusting the start or due date of the task. When editing either the date or the duration fields, the other field will also be directly impacted. We will take a look at both approaches now.

To edit the duration field directly, while in table or gantt view, activate the "Duration" field through the gear icon in the top left corner. Then the user can then directly change the value of the number of days being anticipated to complete the selected task

Notice that when the duration of the task is changed this changes the due date of the selected task. This is because the user is stating that the task will no longer take the anticipated 12 days to complete, but instead will take 22, so the system will default to adding 10 extra days onto the end of the task's current completion time frame.

Note: An important thing to keep in mind about the above is that because changing the durations of a task means you're also changing the dates of that task, when the tasks of the project also has predecessors and a dependency chain within it, you will be changing the dates of any tasks downstream within the dependency chain as well.

What if, however, the user wanted the task duration to adjust to 22 days, but for the task instead to start 10 days sooner, and not end 10 days later? This leads us to changing a duration through the date field. The user could go to the same task in either table or gantt view, and simply adjust the start date by the given 10 days, and the duration of the task will shift to the 22 day duration value.

Note: A user can still change the duration value by shifting the due date for the task as well, by adjusting the due date to 10 days later, the duration and date will shift just as if the user had changed the duration value from 12 to 22 directly.

Removing Durations

Removing durations is a straight forward process. In the gantt or table view, activate the duration field, and simply remove the duration value for the task. This will also automatically remove the dates associated with the task, because you are telling the system that this task will take 0 days to complete.

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