(OBX) Building Parent Tasks & Task Dependencies

Build your project timeline and group similar Tasks under a common umbrella to make them more easily accessible on your Boards

05-Mar-2025
Knowledge

Title

(OBX) Building Parent Tasks & Task Dependencies

URL Name

Building-Parent-Tasks-Time-Dependencies

Body

Lesson Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll have:

Organized your Tasks into Parent Tasks if needed
Created Task Dependencies

Grouping Tasks Under An Umbrella

In the last lesson we have broken down your work into a set of Tasks and we have tried to find a good balance between maintaining clarity of the process and the number of Tasks that your project managers will have to complete on a Board.

There is an additional way we can facilitate their work on a Board and that is by grouping a set of Tasks under different umbrellas. In that way, they won’t have to scroll down as much to find a Task and they can click on the relevant umbrella instead. For example, you can decide to group the Tasks ‘Schedule Kick-off Call’, ‘Kick-off Call’ and ‘Send follow up’ under a Parent Task called ‘Kick-off’. In that case, on your Board you would only see the Parent Task ‘Kick-off’.

You can then access its Subtask by clicking on the total of Subtasks complete: in this case “⅓ subtasks complete”:

In order to create Parent Tasks in your Task Template, you can enter their reference in the ‘Parent Reference’ column of their Subtasks. Example: in the spreadsheet below I have grouped the first 3 Tasks under the Parent Task ‘Kickoff’.

Creating Task Dependencies

You can also use Task References to create dependencies between them and set their start date automatically depending on their Predecessors. If you have set up Dependencies for your Tasks, you will see that editing Tasks' Start Date or Duration will automatically edit the Start Date if its successors, respecting the Lead/Lag Days that have set up between them on your templates.

Tasks Dependencies can then be edited, and even created, manually on every Board (please see Managing Task Dependencies for more information), but having them already set up in your Task Templates will massively facilitate the work for your team. That is even if Lead/Lad Days or Duration of Tasks are not 100% correct to start with: it's much quicker to manually edit Tasks' Start Dates and Duration along project delivery than having to build every Task dependency from scratch when starting a new project.

In order to create Task Dependencies and set Tasks' Start Date and Duration, you will have first check what Precursive Version you are running on. Note - your Precursive Platform comprises of 3 installed packages. You want to check the version of the package called 'Precursive OBX'.

For Precursive OBX Version 21.0 or higher

Please add and fill the following columns to your Task Template:

Predecessor Dependencies Reference
available from Winter '22 release (version: 21.0.*)

Here you can add a Task Reference if you want to condition the start of a Task based on the end of the Reference Task. If you want a to condition the start of a Task based on the end of a prior Task, then grab the Reference value of the prior Task and paste onto the Predecessor Reference cell of the second one. Add the Lead/Lag value after the reference with underscore “_”. You can add multiple dependencies by separating them with a semi-colon. (please see Managing Task Dependencies for more information).

Format: Text

Examples:

“KickOff_+1”: the Task with Reference 'KickOff' is the predecessor and Lead/Lag value equals 1 day
“KickOff_+1;Sharing Doc_+3”: both the Task with Reference 'KickOff' and the one with Reference with 'Sharing Doc' are the predecessors and the Lead/Lag value equals respectively 1 and 3 days.

Note - The value of 0 (zero) means the following Task will be set to start on the same day its predecessor is completed.

Start Date

Here you can define a Start Date for your Task. That can achieved in different ways:

You can define a specific date. Enter the date in format YYYY-MM-DD. E.g. 2018-05-21
You can use relative values, such as TODAY or TODAY+1. TODAY = the date the Board is created using the Task Template. If you are using Time Dependencies (see Predecessor Dependencies References above, you can set the Start Date as TODAY for your first Task and then have the rest automatically calculated by the system by specifying Lead/Lag days in the Predecessor Dependencies References.
You can use a related Date field in Salesforce.

Duration

That is the number of days that it should take to complete a Task.

Format: Number

For Precursive OBX Versions prior to 21.0

If you are running on an older version of Precursive (any version before 21.0, you will have to set your Predecessor and the Lead/Lag days in separate columns to create Task Dependencies. Please check the table below to learn how. In alternative, please check How to upgrade to the newest Precursive Platform version? to update your platform. You can still use the columns in the table above to set Start Date and Duration for your Tasks.

Predecessor Reference

Here you can add a Task Reference if you want to condition the start of a Task based on the end of the Reference Task. If you want a to condition the start of a Task based on the end of a prior Task, then grab the Reference value of the prior Task and paste onto the Predecessor Reference cell of the second one.

Format: Text

💡 Do not forget to add a Lead/Lag (days) value - see below - to any Tasks on the template containing a Predecessor Reference value!

Lead/Lag (Days)

The number of days between the end of the predecessor Task and the start the next one. Values for Lead/Lag should be a number of days.

Format: Number

Note - The value of 0 (zero) means the following Task will be set to start on the same day its predecessor is completed.

Migration into new Multiple Tasks’ Dependencies

Old Templates will work properly also if updating to version 21.0* and you would still be able to build Multiple Dependencies manually on your boards (please see Managing Task Dependencies for more information), but we still recommend changing them to fit the new Data Model.

All the details related to data migration into new Data Model are described here: Precursive OBX Winter '22 Release (v21.0) - Critical Upgrade Actions for System Administrators.you can add the
to complete the following columns: