In this article:
1. How to Sync Planned Dates between Child and Parent Initiatives
For Planned Start Date
For Planned End Date
2. Managing Portfolio Initiatives with Inherited Planned Dates in the Planning View
In complex initiative hierarchies, a child initiative may sometimes be scheduled to start or end after its parent initiative’s planned end date. To avoid these discrepancies and keep dates aligned, Businessmap offers an option to sync planned dates by inheriting them. Here’s a quick guide on how to use this feature when managing portfolio initiatives.
1. How to Sync Planned Dates between Child and Parent Initiatives
When creating or editing a portfolio initiative, you can assign specific planned start and end dates. Alternatively, you can configure the initiative to inherit those dates from its linked child initiatives and/or child cards, thus ensuring that timelines across hierarchical items stay aligned. These settings are only available to initiatives in portfolio workflows, they don't apply to timeline initiatives. Below are the available options:
For Planned Start Date:
- Specific dates — select a date from the calendar. This option will not automatically inherit the planned date of the initiative's children.
- Inherit the earliest date from the initiative's hierarchy — the planned start date will inherit the earliest start date from all the child initiatives in the hierarchy. Child initiatives without planned start dates will be ignored by the system.
- Inherit the earliest date from the initiative's hierarchy, including cards — the planned start date will be inherited from the earliest start date of its child initiatives or cards. For cards, the planned start date is calculated by subtracting the card size (a size of 1 equals 1 day) from its deadline*. Cards without a size or deadline will be excluded.
* For example, if a card has a size of 10 and its deadline is 2024-10-20, the system will calculate its planned start date as 2024-10-10.
For Planned End Date:
- Specific dates — same as the planned start date, you can select a fixed date from the calendar.
- Inherit the latest date from the initiative's hierarchy — the planned end date will inherit the latest end date out of all the child initiatives in the hierarchy. Child initiatives without planned end dates will be ignored by the system.
- Inherit the latest date from the initiative's hierarchy, including cards — the planned end date will inherit the latest planned end date from a child initiative or the deadline of its child cards.
If date syncing is enabled but none of the child initiatives or cards have planned dates or deadlines, the planned date fields will display “Not Planned.” The same will also appear if the initiative has no linked children.
2. Managing Portfolio Initiatives with Inherited Planned Dates in the Planning View
When the planned start and/or end date is set to inherit dates from the hierarchy, those dates cannot be manually edited inside the initiative, or from the planning view (the handle to adjust the planned initiative duration disappears). In this scenario, if you update the planned dates of the child initiative, it will automatically update the planned dates of the parent initiative.
You can see this in action in the short video below where “Strategic Objectives” is the parent of “New Market Opportunities” and is configured to inherit its planned start and end dates:
Because the planned dates are inherited, you won’t be able to drag and drop the initiative on the timeline, and auto-scheduling will also be disabled for this initiative (in case it has a predecessor).
Additionally, if you try to update the initiative's duration from the planning view, an error message will appear, preventing the change.