When it comes to managing deadlines, many teams struggle to balance between keeping to up-to-date priorities and meeting strict, non-negotiable deadlines in time. Wrike makes accurate planning possible in many ways. There are tasks with and without due dates, prioritizing, milestones, and dependencies.
Today we want to share a helpful tip that a customer shared with us regarding managing strict and changing deadlines with the help of recurrent tasks and milestones.
Scheduling Challenges at RPBA
Ricardo da Palma Borges & Associados (RPBA) is a Portugal-based law firm that knows a lot about managing complex schedules. In their projects, they deal with two types of deadlines: those imposed by clients on consulting or planning projects and those imposed by courts and other public entities on litigation. While the former may change in the course of the project, the latter are strictly non-negotiable milestones.
“It is sometimes impossible to keep to prior schedules when the default term for any tax litigation development is 10 straight days. We have to constantly adjust previous deadlines in view of more pressing matters,” shares Ricardo da Palma Borges, a partner and specialist lawyer at RPBA.
Unique Solution Using Recurrent Tasks
The team found a unique way to deal with this challenge in Wrike. Any time there are legal proceedings, they create a recurrent task with two occurrences. The first occurrence is a strict immovable milestone, typically used for court hearings or deadlines for filing documents. The second occurrence is merely a task with a prior due date that is used to adjust the project schedule internally in order to achieve interim goals.
The team seamlessly collaborates on the case in the first task occurrence and reschedules it according to their current priorities, while the milestone always remains at the same place. This way, the timeline always reflects an up-to-date schedule with both interim and strict deadlines during law firm hours, and team members can quickly evaluate if they’re on track to meet them.
If you face the same deadline challenge in your industry, what about trying this tip for planning your tasks? Let us know if it works well for your team or if you want to share another best practice with our community!
