About milestones. A milestone won't spoil the schedule.

Let's start with the definition. A milestone is a key moment associated with the completion or start of a key event, the signing of important documents, or any other significant action. It is important to understand that the "key moment" itself occurs instantly, in contrast to the event with the end or start of which it is associated. For example, the "Agreement signed" milestone is associated with a long process of developing and agreeing on an agreement. Milestone: "Regulations have been agreed upon," "The vessel has been launched."

These events were preceded by quite long-term activities, which are designated in the schedule network diagram as operations (works). The very moment when the signature is on paper, the ship touches the water, occurs almost instantly and is designated as a milestone.



Formulating requirements for the development of schedule network schedules, especially when it is necessary to regulate the work of many schedulers in large and megaprojects, it would not be superfluous to require that the names of milestones be entered as verbal adjectives in the completed form. That is, "something is signed", not "signing", "something is agreed upon", not "coordination". This will avoid discrepancies and summary reports for project management will be more informative.

For example, you have a not very responsible employee in your department. And you managed to entrust him with the two-week task of "developing business requirements." You did not have the opportunity to detail the task. You took the duration estimate from experience with a good margin. There are few things that make some employees happier than a task with a due date of 2 weeks or more. When, a week later, you want to understand the status of the task, it is unlikely that you will be able to ask something more specific like: "Vasily, how are things going with the development of business requirements?" As is the question, so is the answer. "Great," Vasily will say, "the work is in full swing, I'll finish it in a week."

At the same time, perhaps, the business requirements were not yet a horse. Vasily is definitely a villain. But the situation is your fault as a leader. It would be advisable to divide the task into preliminary and final development of the schedule network model, placing between them the milestone "draft BT sent to the beginning. department."
Then, if you don't receive the draft on time, you can ask more precise questions: "Where is the draft?", "When will you send it?" And Vasily himself, seeing the close control point, will not relax much.

On the classification of milestones. Almost always, classification of milestones is necessary. Some milestones correspond to contract clauses in project management services; violation of their deadlines results in sanctions. As a rule, these milestones are displayed in reports at the project portfolio level, and top management and the PMC contractor monitor their status. Milestones of a lower rank, as a rule, indicate the closure of project phases and other important events; they are of interest to the project manager. Other milestones may indicate events within a department's package of work and will be of interest at the operational level.

I remember one company practiced "premium" milestones. At the beginning of the month, the project manager for each department selected several events from the many events planned for the coming month and declared them "premium". If all "bonus" events occurred without delay, the department received a bonus. The effect was powerful. Local managers immediately mastered the calculation of the promotion of critical paths not only to the end of the project, but also to any point, operational schedules began to be carefully planned, and communications between departments began to work. The project took off like a racing car.

But let's return to the classification. It can be made either a user field or an operation code (in Project, a field of the "directory encoding" type). Typically, we call this field "CT Level" and assign different numerical values ​​to the milestones. Directive - "1", project - "2", etc.

On the benefits of different ideas. More than once I have seen how a novice planner, having written his first serious schedule network schedule, admires it. "So slender and handsome," "now everything is lined up in my head." Alas, if the planner shows his schedule to the customer, he is unlikely to share his enthusiasm. "How confusing everything is, he's probably being clever, he wants to inflate the price," it will be written on the face of the customer looking at this five-meter sheet. It's not for nothing that serious network planning systems contain a lot of layouts (representations), that is, ways to display design data in a form acceptable for the current situation. The customer is primarily interested in when what results will be achieved in the project, that is, to see the Big Picture.

To get such a report, just apply the milestones filter on the Gantt chart. Sometimes it makes more sense to display top-level summary tasks and important milestones on the Project timeline. The functionality of the timeline does not shine with variety. You can manually color task rectangles, display them as callouts, and add several more scales in parallel, displaying other tasks and milestones of the same project in them.

Much more interesting is the Visio "Timeline" template. The template appeared back in the 2003 version of Visio. Allows you to import data from Project files, for example by requiring import of only top-level milestones and tasks. A particularly useful tool in Visio is the extended timeline, which is a kind of time magnifying glass.

For example, at a meeting I need to be reminded of the essence of the project - for this I use the top timeline, where I display all the main phases of the project and the main events. Below, using a magnifying glass, I display the current month on the scale to remind you what part of the project is currently being completed. And with the help of another magnifying glass I enter the current week to clarify what events should be expected during the week and discuss problems.

This is definitely more clear than taking a screenshot of a 10-slide Gantt chart and quickly scrolling through them back and forth during a discussion.

Moral: I remember that I had to spend a lot of effort to convince my daughter that when you are preparing a gift, it is not enough that you personally like it. It's the same with data views.