Apply a deadline to a task when you want to track a deadline for a specific task, but don’t want to lock your schedule by setting an inflexible constraint such as Must Finish On or Finish No Later Than. Such constraints affect scheduling, while the Deadline field simply causes an indicator to show if a task has not been completed by its deadline. Certain tasks in your project should finish by specific target dates. However, you don’t want these dates to actually affect how Project Plan 365 schedules the tasks; you just want to be alerted if the tasks are not completed by these dates. Add the Deadline field to the Entry table of the Gantt Chart view, and set the deadline dates for these tasks.

By setting a task deadline, instead of imposing an inflexible constraint for a task to mark its finish date, you can achieve a more flexible and dynamic project schedule. A dynamic schedule is properly sequenced and is free of any task constraints. The benefit is that the project manager can assess changes to the project end date (via the critical path) without experiencing constraint errors.

Deadlines can be added to any task in the project schedule. You may want to add specific deadlines based on the tasks on the critical path or on important milestones. The deadline gives you flexibility in setting a commitment date that isn’t tied directly to a baseline finish date.