Recalculate project timelines

Last update: February 28, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • User

Recalculating Timelines allows managers to see how different factors related to the project are impacting the project’s timeline. A project’s timeline refers to planned and projected dates.

Making changes to schedules, personnel time off, and other items outside the scope of a project do not impact the project timeline immediately. The project timeline is impacted when the timeline is recalculated. External influences do not take effect on your project until the recalculation occurs.

This article describes the ways in which timeline recalculation happens.

Access requirements

Automatic timeline recalculation happens without special access for any of the users involved in working on the project.

However, you must have the following access to manually recalculate the timeline of a project:

Adobe Workfront plan*Any
Adobe Workfront license*Plan
Access level configurations*

Edit access to Projects

System administrator to recalculate timeline for all projects in the system

NOTE

If you still don’t have access, ask your Workfront administrator if they set additional restrictions in your access level. For information on how a Workfront administrator can modify your access level, see Create or modify custom access levels.

Object permissions

Manage permissions to a project

For information on requesting additional access, see Request access to objects.

*To find out what plan, license type, or access you have, contact your Workfront administrator.

Automatic recalculation

By default, project timelines are automatically recalculated daily when the project scope changes or every night. The Workfront administrator determines whether to automatically calculate timelines every night or with every scope change by managing the Timelines settings in the Project Preferences area of Setup. For more information, see Configure timeline recalculations for projects.

NOTE
If the timeline of a project is longer than 15 years, the automatic recalculation is disabled for that project. You can only select an Update Type of Manual for a project longer than 15 years. If you change the dates on the project to less than 15 years, you must manually recalculate your timeline one time before it is calculated automatically.
IMPORTANT
For the Preview and Custom Refresh Sandbox environments, the nightly recalculation is disabled, and the project timelines are not recalculated automatically. You must manually recalculate the project timeline for the Preview and the Custom Refresh Sandbox environments.

Automatic recalculation of project timelines

Adobe Workfront recalculates timelines daily only for projects where all of the following conditions are met:

  • Have a status of Current

  • Update Type of the project is set to Automatic or Automatic and On Change

    For information about the type of project Update Type, see Project Update Type overview.

  • Have a Last Update Date within the past three months
    Workfront administrator can change this default functionality, as described in Configure timeline recalculations for projects.

  • Last calculation date of the project timeline is not within the current calendar day. This means that the last calculation date of the project timeline is before 00:00 of the current day.

You can configure how frequently the timeline for your project is updated. When the project timeline is updated, it is recalculated based on changes made to the project.

For information, see Select the project Update Type.

Actions that trigger an automatic recalculation of project timelines

Various scope changes in the life of a project automatically recalculate the project timeline, including the following actions:

  • Updating task status.
  • Moving a task to a different project.
  • Updating the Planned Date or Planned Completion Dates of the tasks.
  • Updating the Duration Type, Task Constraint, or the number of assignees on the tasks.
  • Updating task predecessor relationships.
  • Adding an approval to a task that also adds time to the Planned Completion Date of the task.
    For more information about approval settings, see Configure global approval settings.

Manual recalculation

As a project owner, you can manually recalculate the timelines for individual projects. The Workfront administrator can manually recalculate all timelines in Workfront.

Recalculate timelines for individual projects or in bulk

You can recalculate the timeline of a project in Workfront from the project page or from a project list or report.

  1. Go to the project for which you want to recalculate the timeline and click the More icon More menu to the left of the project name

    More dropdown

    Or

    Go to a project list or report and select one or several projects, then click the More icon More menu at the top of the list.

    TIP
    Depending on the complexity of your projects, we recommend not to select a large number of projects when recalculating their timelines in bulk to ensure optimum performance. Some things that could make a project too complex might be multiple dependencies or assignments, or a large number of custom fields.

  2. Click  Recalculate Timeline.

    After the timeline is recalculated, you see a message indicating that the recalculation was successful.

    TIP
    Before the timeline recalculation is finished, some planned or projected dates might display as dimmed. This means that the recalculation is not yet finished, and the dates are subject to change.