Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.
In this section we’re going to look at Milestones.
And Milestones are used to denote significant points or events in a project.
Usually milestone tasks have zero duration but Project 2016 does allow milestones with
non-zero durations as well.
Milestones are used for a number of different purposes.
And amongst the most important ones are as a way of providing a management snapshot of
progress on a project.
So there is for example a particular report called a Milestone Report where you can just
view the key milestones in the project and get a summary of where you are in terms of
those milestones which in turn gives you a good idea of general progress on the project.
They can also be used to show you what’s coming up next, what’s happening say over
the next week or the next month or the next few days.
And very often milestones are associated with a payment schedule of some sort.
So for example, when a particular point is reached in a project there may be a payment
to make.
Now what I’m going to do with the wedding project is to take some of the existing tasks
and turn them into milestones.
And I may well introduce one or two new milestones as I go through.
Before I start note what I’ve done with the project at this stage.
This is version 03 of the project.
I have collapsed all of the summary tasks.
Note that when I do this you can’t see all of the dependencies.
So for instance, there is a dependency between a task in Wedding day and the setting of the
wedding date.
But because Wedding day is collapsed you can’t see that link.
If I expand Wedding day that link is now visible Note the link from Book wedding venue, task
40, up to Set wedding date.
But when Wedding day as a summary task is collapsed you can no longer see that link.
So this just emphasizes the point that when you’re looking at a project with some summary
task collapse you need to be careful at what you’re interpreting because some elements
of the project may have become invisible even though they’re actually quite significant.
Now one very important aspect of Milestones is that generally speaking although I should
say there are exceptions, but generally speaking because a milestone is a task of zero duration
it is assumed that there is little or no work associated with the milestone itself.
If I take task 4 here, Set wedding date, if that doesn’t actually involve any significant
amount of work I could make it into a milestone.
But what I’m actually going to do on this occasion is to insert specifically a milestone
which indicates when that task has been completed.
So I’m going to select the task below it which is basically a blank row and then on
the Task Tab in the Insert Group I’m going to say Insert Task.
Now that task I’m going to rename to Wedding date set.
So that’s basically a statement that something has happened.
It isn’t something to do itself.
And then in the duration for that task I’m going to change it to zero days which will
make it into a milestone.
And the default notation, the default symbol in a Gantt Chart for a milestone is a diamond.
So now I’m going to select Set wedding date and select Wedding date set and link them
in the usual way.
And I have my first Milestone in my project.
Now I’m also going to set milestones that indicate when the venues have been booked,
the venue for the wedding and the venue for the reception.
So let’s start with the reception venue.
So I want something to indicate that task 21 has been completed.
I can do the same that I did just now, Insert Task, but there’s also an option within
the Insert Group on the Task Tab of Insert Milestone.
So that automatically gives me a task of zero duration.
Let’s change the name.
Once again put in the linkage and do the same down here for the wedding venue.
And then I’ve just got a very few other milestones to add.
I’m going to add one to indicate that all of the attire has been ordered, one to indicate
that the guest list has been finalized and finally that the wedding is registered and
licensed.
And then I have just one more thing to do and that is that I’m going to turn the wedding
date itself into a milestone.
But I don’t want to reduce its duration to zero days because there will be things
to do on the wedding day itself.
So what I’m going to do is to double click on the wedding day and I’m going to use
on the Advanced Tab this little checkbox in the bottom left hand corner, Mark task as
milestone.
Click on OK.
The task is now marked as a Milestone.
But as you can see its duration is a day.
And there will be work for people to do on that day.
Let’s hope they don’t think about it too much as work.
But as far as Microsoft Project is concerned it is work.
So there we are.
We have some milestones in our project.
I’m going to take a look at those in just a moment.
Before we do I don’t actually need the Timeline at the moment.
And the project is beginning to take up more and more space.
So let’s save a bit of space by hiding the Timeline.
Can you remember how to do that?
You go to the View Tab and you can just switch off the Timeline.
So uncheck that checkbox in Split View and we now have a little bit more space to see
the project.
If you only wanted to see the milestones you can use one of the features of the View Tab
which is to use a Filter.
And in the Data Group on the View Tab there is a Filter control with a dropdown there
and one of the options on the dropdown is Milestones.
And if I select that I will only see the project milestones.
And that gives you some idea of how useful milestones can be in terms of setting out
the key points in the project over the course of its duration.
Now one other point that’s clear here is that we still have a lot of work to do on
this project because for instance we still haven’t worked out when the wedding day
is going to be.
It’s still right near the beginning of the project.
Now you might be a little bit frustrated by this and thinking well why don’t we sort
out the wedding date?
Well the reason that we don’t is that we still have some very key factors to take into
account before we can work out when the wedding date can be.
And we’re going to be moving onto those factors after we’ve done Exercise 03.
Once we’ve done those we’ll be in a better position to actually pin down a wedding day
and then we’ll see again how useful these milestones can be in terms of giving us a
realistic summary of the key points in the project.
Now if you have applied a filter as I have here I can un-apply it by clicking on that
dropdown again and saying No Filter.
That’s the end of this section.
Exercise 03 is the next one so please join me
for that.