That was the glory of the good ole Gannt Chart in what I might call Microsoft Project Based Project Management.

If you set your dependencies right, the dates would just slip by themselves, and it was easy to tell the bosses what slipped. Required a lot of printing and taping every week, and caused a ton of headache whenever people lied about their progress, and didn’t really work without a FTE project manager, but I have yet to see a supposedly better system actually work better on big projects.