Weather Delay Cascade

When bad weather stops work on a construction site, the schedule needs to absorb the lost time. BuildChart's weather delay cascade lets you shift affected task dates forward automatically, propagating the change through all downstream dependencies so your entire schedule stays consistent.

How It Works

The weather delay cascade is a guided process that walks you through selecting which tasks were affected, previewing the date shifts, and applying them in one action. Here are the steps:

1. Click "Weather Delay" in the project header toolbar. This opens the weather delay dialog.
2. Select delay amount and weather condition. Choose Full day (8 hours), Half day (4 hours), or Custom to enter specific hours. Then select the weather condition that caused the delay (Heavy Rain, Snow, Extreme Heat, etc.). This information is recorded in the activity log for documentation purposes.
3. Select affected tasks. A checklist of all active tasks appears. Check the boxes next to every task that was impacted by the weather. You do not need to select dependent tasks — the cascade handles those automatically.
4. System calculates the shift. BuildChart converts delay hours into business day shifts: 1 to 8 hours of delay equals 1 business day shift. The calculation uses NETWORKDAYS-aware logic, which means it skips weekends when shifting dates forward. A Friday task delayed by one day moves to Monday, not Saturday.
5. Preview the changes. Before anything is applied, you see a table showing each affected task with its current end date and its new end date after the shift. Dependent tasks that will cascade are also shown with their projected new dates.
6. Click Apply. The end dates shift forward for all selected tasks. Then the standard dependency cascade runs: every finish-to-start dependent of the shifted tasks has its start and end dates pushed forward by the same variance. If any cascaded task exceeds the project hard deadline, you see a warning.
7. Activity log entry created. BuildChart records the weather delay in the project activity log, including the hours lost, the weather condition, which tasks were affected, and the resulting date changes. This creates an audit trail for schedule justification.

NETWORKDAYS-Aware Shifting

All date shifts use the same NETWORKDAYS calculation as the rest of BuildChart. Workdays are Monday through Friday. When a shift would land on a Saturday or Sunday, the date rolls forward to the next Monday. This ensures that shifted dates always fall on valid work days and duration calculations remain accurate.

Multiple Delay Days

If weather disrupts work across multiple days (for example, three consecutive rain days), apply each delay separately rather than entering 24 hours as a single delay. This allows the cascade to calculate correctly for each day, accounting for weekends and dependencies that may have shifted from a previous day's cascade.