Add Milestones to the Project

Quick reference

• 00:05 At this point, we've built a detailed project schedule.
• 00:09 We have all of 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.
• 00:22 So you can see here we have a lot of tasks but we only have one milestone,
• 00:26 which is essentially the end of the project.
• 00:29 It's a best practice to always have a final task that has a zero day duration,
• 00:34 making it a milestone in your project.
• 00:37 But it's also a good best practice to include milestones as you move throughout
• 00:42 the work breakdown schedule of your project.
• 00:45 So we're going to add a few milestones now.
• 00:48 Milestones are important to our project because it helps us
• 00:51 identify major areas of work that are complete.
• 00:54 We can also incorporate those into our reports as well.
• 00:58 So we wouldn't, for example, create an acquire land milestone,
• 01:03 a create architectural design milestone, and acquire loan milestone.
• 01:07 All we really need to do is create a loan that says that we've acquired the land.
• 01:12 So, let's right click on Build House, and choose Insert Task.
• 01:17 That puts a new task above Build House.
• 01:21 And here, we'll say land acquisition complete,
• 01:26 and make that zero days.
• 01:30 Let's talk a little bit about how we name milestones.
• 01:33 Just like we create tasks that have a verb, acquire, create,
• 01:40 we always want to have a milestone showing that it is complete.
• 01:45 It's a good idea to always end a milestone with the word complete.
• 01:49 If you don't use the word complete, use another word that makes sense to you, but
• 01:54 be consistent because this will show up in reports.
• 01:58 Now just like any other task in your schedule,
• 02:01 it does need to be linked to the critical path.
• 02:05 So right now, there's no tasks linking to task six.
• 02:09 I know this because I can look in the successor column and
• 02:12 see that there is a blank area here.
• 02:15 So first of all,
• 02:16 the land acquisition complete is going to be tied to task number five.
• 02:22 And I can see I have my waterfall
• 02:25 method over here on the right hand side of the screen.
• 02:28 Now, I also need to link another task to it as well.
• 02:32 And so I'm going to link task number eight to task six now.
• 02:37 And watch what happens to the successor cell in that task.
• 02:42 It linked for us.
• 02:44 And so now what I can do is I can go up and down the successors and
• 02:47 predecessors columns and make sure that there aren't any blank cells.
• 02:52 Remember we never link with summary tasks, so it's okay that these are blank.
• 02:59 I will add a milestone for every phase of work in the project.
• 03:54 At this point, you might we wondering why we didn't add these milestones earlier
• 03:59 in the estimating process.
• 04:01 Well we absolutely could have, we could put these in whenever we want.
• 04:05 However, we're getting to the point now where we have a really well estimated
• 04:09 schedule, and so what we're doing is we're putting the finishing touches on it.
• 04:13 Sometimes, adding these finishing touches, as you can see,
• 04:16 can add a little bit more work because we just inserted a few milestones, but
• 04:20 then had it to re-link predecessors and successors in our task.
• 04:24 That's okay, because as you're going through the process, you may learn
• 04:29 there's ways to optimize your schedule by re-linking different tasks.
• 04:34 So it's okay that you're adding these at the end.
• 04:36 It's a good practice to wait until you are nearly ready to start the project before
• 04:41 you add all of your milestones.
• 04:44 Now let's take a look at how we can see these milestones, and make use of them.
• 04:48 And I'm gonna show you a few different ways as we move through these lessons.
• 04:52 If you click the View tab, we’re going to look at the most obvious one,
• 04:57 which is this Filter pick list.
• 04:59 And if we choose Milestones,
• 05:01 you can see here are all the milestones under their Summary Tasks.
• 05:06 This would make for a nice little print out, report, export to PDF, or
• 05:11 just view to create when we're talking to people about what
• 05:15 the progress is of our project, and what the key milestones are.
• 05:19 To get back to the Gantt chart view, just chose this again and select no filter.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.