How to account for waiting before starting a task (i.e. waiting for delivery of item)

[Mahmood Hikmet]

In our team, sometimes we ship things between locations. I need the item to reach the destination before I can start working on tasks that involve that item (i.e. waiting for a circuit board to be delivered).

If I know delivery will take about 5 days, then I don't want any of the blocked tasks to start until 5 days from now. If the item DOES get delivered early, or there's a delay in delivery, I want to be able to see the effect of that.

I thought about setting up a "release" for when the item arrives. But then how do I dynamically control the beginning of work on the following release to coincide with the end of the current one? Otherwise I can set up a task for "waiting for delivery", however, this throws off the scheduler, because then I have a team member literally waiting around for a delivery rather than doing some other work in the meantime.

How do I make this work in Portfolio?

[Mahmood Hikmet]

To all future internet people, I found an answer but only in the Portfolio Server documentation. This will work great!

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfolioserver/time-constraints-715263082.html

Just in case that link goes dead, you are able to add an "Earliest Start Date" for an issue. So you either modify the "earliest start date" of whatever is being blocked, OR you can create a task for "delivery" and set its estimated time to 0 and adjust the "earliest start date" for it as you learn more about when it will arrive to have everything else schedule as portfolio does.