Managing Agile Project With Project- How To Handle Sub-Tasks When They Don't Finish and Need Moved?

[JBLT-77]

I'm trying to use Project to manage an agile project, and where I'm running into problems is if I have a story which is an auto scheduled sub-task and the Iteration/Sprint is a fixed duration manually scheduled summary task.  I have a scenario where the SubTask  doesn't finish within the fixed duration summary task it is assigned to so I move it under the next iteration summary task.  What project ends up doing is changing the actual start date of the summary task to the actual start date of the sub-task that I reassigned from the previous iteration.  

When viewing the Sprint Summary task details form my baseline and current start date is unchanged (6/22), then when I select the "Actual" radial button, the actual start date shows as 6/8 which is when the sub-task that carrier over from a previous iteration started.  MS Project does not let me change the actual start date of the summary task to be what it should be which is 6/22.  It is grayed out as you can see in the second screenshot.

Is there a workaround for this?  Otherwise when I go to look at the variance table, its going to show that the summary task actual start of 6/8 when it actually started on 6/22.  This in turn creates a false reporting making it look like the summary task started ahead of schedule when it really didn't.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

John,
Keep in mind that summary lines are NOT tasks, they are simply a summary of the performance (subtasks) under them. If you move a performance task that started on 6/8/22 under a summary line that previously showed a start of 6/22/22, that summary line is going to re-set its start date to 6/8/22 because it is "summarizing" the new subtask start.

Summary lines do NOT "actually" start or finish, they just parrot the subtasks which do have actual starts and finishes. So, there is no "false" reporting, Project is performing the way it was designed.

John