When a Project is closed, the Project's Planned End Date is used to populate the Actual End Date instead of taking the Current Date as the Actual End Date.

London+

This is expected behavior as of London.

This change is documented in the London release notes:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-release-notes/page/release-notes/business-management/project-portfolio-management-rn.html

From our Development regarding why this functionality was changed, there are three main reasons:

1. The majority of people using the Project Management application wanted the ServiceNow functionality to align more with other project management tools in the market such as MS Project. When a project is moved to Work in Progress in MS Project, the actual start date is populated with the planned start date.

2. If a task was moved to WIP by a user on a different day than the planned start date, all subsequent tasks with dependency and the overall planned end date for the project would change. Many project managers were confused by this functionality because their dates were not the same as when they originally planned the project.

3. Changing the functionality removed the time component from dates so that an 8-hour schedule is honored. Previously, if the project started at a time of 14:00, the end date would be calculated from the duration and would also end at the time of 14:00. This would cause 3 hours of time to be lost on the project.

Development has also provided some other notes regarding this inquiry:

- There is no way to roll back this feature. This was a thoroughly thought out decision and it would be difficult for ServiceNow to maintain two paths of code.
- While this is able to be customized, It is highly recommended that it is not because it will surely break upon future upgrades.
- If this is a very big changed for your users, it is suggested to set up a training plan for all users to explain the details and thought process put into this change.