Microsoft Project – Change Project Start Date and Move Deadlines

Microsoft Project has a few ways to update a project start date, but if you have Task Deadlines, your project schedule could incur an unwanted side effect if you don’t choose the right method for making the project start date change. That is, the start date will change, but task deadline dates will not move / shift with the updated schedule. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to correctly change the project start date in a way that will also move your task deadlines in a single step.

Microsoft Project Template Review


Each of the first 3 stages are allotted 5 days to complete; projects also always begin on a Monday and end on a Friday. The final stage is both a deadline and a milestone, the summary task titled Deliver, and I’ll show you how that’s setup as part of this post later.

For now, here’s a simplified representation of that template seen in Microsoft Project Gantt Chart View:


Summary Task as a Milestone and Deadline

The “Deliver” summary task is both a Microsoft Project milestone, and it’s also a deadline. When I first setup the template, I set the “Deliver” task duration to “0 days”, and the default behavior for Microsoft Project is to make a task a milestone when you set a task duration to “0 days”. Try it out:

  • Add a task.
  • Set its duration to “0 days”





Change Microsoft Project Start Date


So what’s the problem?

Project Information Start Date Change Does Not Move Deadline Dates



If a PMO team member wants to re-use the template, and start a new project on Monday, April 29, 2019., that should then end on Friday, May 17, 2019. So, s/he changes the project start date in the manner shown above.




Move Project Does Move Deadlines




Now, when the date is changed to Monday, April 29, 2019, the task deadline correctly shifts to May 17, 2019.

Thanks for reading.

Categories: Microsoft Project


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