Recalculate project timelines
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:
*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.
Automatic recalculation of project timelines automatic-recalculation-of-project-timelines
Adobe Workfront recalculates timelines daily only for projects where all of the following conditions are met:
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Have a status of Current
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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.
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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 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 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 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.
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Go to the project for which you want to recalculate the timeline and click the More icon
Or
Go to a project list or report and select one or several projects, then click the More icon
note tip 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. -
Click Recalculate Timeline.
After the timeline is recalculated, you see a message indicating that the recalculation was successful.
note tip 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.
Manually recalculate timelines in bulk in the Edit Projects box manually-recalculate-timelines-in-bulk-in-the-edit-projects-box
You can manually recalculate the timelines of several projects by editing them in bulk.
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Go to a list of projects.
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Select several projects in the list, then click Edit.
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Click Settings, then select Recalculate Timelines.
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Click Save Changes.
Recalculate timelines for all projects in the system (Workfront administrators only) recalculate-timelines-for-all-projects-in-the-system-workfront-administrators-only
Workfront administrators can run the Recalculate Timeline diagnostic to immediately recalculate all timelines in the Workfront system. This allows all Project Managers to see the influence of external changes immediately on both planned and projected dates.
For more information about recalculating timelines for the entire Workfront site, see the section “Recalculate timelines for the entire Workfront instance” in Configure timeline recalculations for projects.