Taking Microsoft Project 2010 for a Test Drive (part 4) - Adding milestones to a project schedule

What Results Must Your Project Produce—and When?

Waiting until the end to see whether a project meets its deadline isn’t just stressful; it also doesn’t give you enough time to go back and fix what went wrong. What’s more, managers, clients, or other stakeholders expect regular status updates, so you need up-to-date information to keep them happy. Setting up regular checkpoints, appropriately called milestones, gives you a chance to gauge your progress frequently. The earlier you discover that the project is falling behind, the more easily you can take corrective action before it’s too late—or too costly.

Milestones are perfect for identifying deliverables—the tangible products or results required to complete a project—and when they’re due. Every project has a major deliverable at the end: a building ready to occupy, a book ready to read, or a design ready to construct. But most projects include additional deliverables along the way, like an approved blueprint or proof copy.

Adding milestones to a project schedule

A milestone typically appears at the end of the tasks that produce the deliverable or achieve a key point in progress. Completing a milestone is like crossing off an item on your To Do list. Project makes it easy to add milestones to your schedule:

1. Click anywhere in the blank row below the last task (“Assemble bar” in the current example) and then choose Task→Insert→Milestone.

   The Task Name cell is set to <New Milestone> and the Duration is 0 days. Project switches the Gantt Chart task bar symbol to a diamond. (Don’t worry about the date on the milestone just yet.) If you select a row containing a task, Project would automatically insert a new row above the selected row.

   Tip

   Because milestones have zero duration, you can add as many as you want without increasing the duration of the project.

2. In the Task Name cell, type Food and drinks ready.

   One way to differentiate milestones from work tasks is to name the milestone based on what was accomplished: “Documentation printed” or “Design complete,” for example.

3. To move the milestone to the same level as its summary task, make sure the milestone task is selected, and choose Task→Schedule→Outdent Task (the green arrow pointing to the left). (Keyboard mavens can press Alt+Shift+left arrow.)

   Project places the milestone at the same level in the outline as the summary task, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Milestones, like “Food and drinks ready” in this example, punctuate the completion of a group of related tasks. Applying them to your schedule gives you checkpoints to gauge progress.

There are actually two schools of thought regarding where milestones sit in an outline. One is to place milestones at the same level as the summary tasks that produce them (as in this example), so you can collapse an outline to hide subordinate tasks, but still see summary tasks and their corresponding deliverables or milestones. Other folks prefer to keep milestones as subtasks, so that the higher-level views show only summary tasks. Try it both ways to see which works for you.

Now’s a good time to practice by adding milestones for other checkpoints in your schedule.