Add Milestones to the Project

Quick reference

• 00:04 At this point, we've built a detailed project schedule.
• 00:08 We have all the tasks, durations, predecessors, and
• 00:13 resources defined for our project.
• 00:16 Something we have not done is looked at milestones and deliverables for a project.
• 00:21 So you can see here we have a lot of tasks, but
• 00:24 we only have one milestone which is essentially the end of the project.
• 00:28 It's a best practice to always have a final task that has a zero day
• 00:33 duration making it a milestone in your project.
• 00:36 But it's also best practice to include milestones as you
• 00:40 move throughout the work breakdown schedule of your project.
• 00:44 So we're going to add a few milestones now.
• 00:47 Milestones are important to our project because it helps us identify major areas
• 00:51 of work that are complete.
• 00:53 We can also incorporate those into our reports as well.
• 00:57 So we wouldn't, for example, create an acquire land milestone or
• 01:01 a create architectural design milestone and acquire a loan milestone.
• 01:05 All we really need to do is create a milestone that says that we've acquired
• 01:09 the land.
• 01:10 So let's right click on build house and choose Insert task,
• 01:15 that puts a new task above build house.
• 01:19 And here we'll say land acquisition
• 01:24 complete and make that 0 days.
• 01:28 Let's talk a little bit about how we name milestones.
• 01:32 Just like we create tasks that have a verb, acquire, create,
• 01:38 we always want to have a milestone showing that it is complete.
• 01:44 It's a good idea to always end the milestone with the word complete.
• 01:47 If you don't use word complete, use another word that makes sense to you, but
• 01:52 be consistent because this will show up in reports.
• 01:56 Now, just like any other task in your schedule,
• 01:59 it does need to be linked to the critical path.
• 02:03 So right now, there's no tasks linking to task 6.
• 02:07 I know this because I can look in the successor column and
• 02:10 see that there's a blank area here.
• 02:13 So first of all,
• 02:14 the land acquisition complete is going to be tied to test number 5.
• 02:20 And I can see I have my waterfall method over here on the right hand side of
• 02:24 the screen.
• 02:25 Now, I also need to link another test to it as well.
• 02:29 And so, I'm going to link task number 8 to task 6 now,
• 02:34 and watch what happens to the successor cell in that task.
• 02:39 It linked for us.
• 02:41 And so now what I can do is I can go up and down the successors and
• 02:45 predecessors columns and make sure that there aren't any blank cells.
• 02:49 Remember, we never link with summary tasks, so it's okay that these are blank.
• 02:55 I will add a milestone for every phase of work in the project.
• 03:04 At this point, you might be wondering why we didn't add these milestones earlier in
• 03:08 the estimating process.
• 03:10 Well, we absolutely could have, we could put these in whenever we want.
• 03:14 However, we're getting to the point now where we have a really well estimated
• 03:19 schedule.
• 03:19 And so what we're doing is we're putting the finishing touches on it.
• 03:23 Sometimes, adding these finishing touches as you can see can add a little
• 03:26 bit more work.
• 03:27 Because we just inserted a few milestones, but
• 03:30 then had to re link predecessors and successors in our tasks.
• 03:33 That's okay because as you're going through the process, you may learn that
• 03:38 there's ways to optimize your schedule by re linking different tasks.
• 03:43 So it's okay that you're adding these at the end.
• 03:45 It's a good practice to wait until you're nearly
• 03:49 ready to start the project before you add all of your milestones.
• 03:53 Now, let's take a look at how we can see these milestones and make use of them, and
• 03:57 I'm going to show you a few different ways as we move through these lessons.
• 04:01 If you click the View tab, we're going to look at the most obvious one,
• 04:06 which is this filter picklist.
• 04:08 And if we choose milestones,
• 04:10 you can see here are all of the milestones under their summary tasks.
• 04:15 This will make for a nice little printout report, export to PDF, or
• 04:19 just view to create when we're talking to people about what
• 04:24 the progress is of our projects, and what the key milestones are.
• 04:28 To get back to the Gantt chart view, just choose this again and select no filter.

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