I'd like to be able to fix the time of day that a given task must start at and its duration without specifying the actual start date. In this scenario, the date would depend on the end time & date of previous tasks while the start time would be defined.
For example, task 2 is set up to have a Finish-Start dependency on task 1. Task 2 is assigned a start time of 13:00. If task 1 ends on July 5th at 20:00, then task 2 will start on July 6th at 13:00. If task 1 is changed so that it ends on July 5th at 10:45, then task 2 begins at 13:00 on July 5th.
Thanks for any input on this. Never needed to do this exact thing before, but assumed it was possible with minimal fuss. Maybe I was wrong? I'm using Project 2016.
Background: I'm planning a rather complex 5 week trip with some long train journeys. These journeys are obviously at fixed start times and are long enough that they should properly be considered in the planning. I thought why not use MS Project to allow me to make changes to each task such as adding stops in a particular place, changing the duration of stops etc. When I make such changes (say to a task in the middle of the trip), I'd obviously like the subsequent tasks to be affected from the point of view of their start & end times. In particular, I'd like to be sure I actually have time overall for all the stages planned.
In principle one can just have dependencies from a given stage set to the completion of the previous one with a Finish-Start relationship.
This works for most things, but a problem arises when organizing things that must start at a particular time of day like train journeys. I don't want to fix the date and time of things like that as changes made to task durations before that date will not be properly reflected in the overall timeline.