Creating and Working with Milestones

Milestones have many uses in @task. You can use them as a way of organizing tasks into larger objectives. You can also use a milestone path to mark tasks or groups of tasks that are significant to your organization and look at these types of tasks over a span of several projects.

When you create a project you can associate a milestone path with the project. The milestone path contains multiple milestones. You can associate a milestone path with several projects or with only one project.

For example, if you want to use milestones as a way to organize projects into objectives, and your project is building a house, then your milestones might consist of the tasks for plumbing, laying the foundation, and so forth. If your project is to build software, then the milestones might contain all the tasks for planning the methods that need to be written, then one for writing them. Later there might be a milestone for the tasks associated with a beta release, and one for bug fixes prior to the final release. Each milestone in a project is part of a milestone path.

Milestone paths are also excellent ways to look at a range of projects over time and assess efficiency of target tasks or task sets that are significant to your organization. For example, the software company that uses a milestone path to organize its tasks can use the same milestone path for every project. Then managers who want to look at trends over a range of projects can do so. They can look at the planning tasks, the beta release tasks and every other milestone task. They can see if certain tasks or task sets are consistently late and if so, examine processes to determine why. If certain milestones are early, they can emulate processes for other areas that do not perform quite as efficiently.

When you create a milestone path, you can name it, describe it, and associate groups with it. Then you can create the milestones. A milestone path can have an unlimited number of milestones. Milestones have names, descriptions, and are associated with a color that you can select. This color is displayed next to a task in a task list so that you can quickly see which task is associated with a milestone.

When you create milestones, as you fill in the milestone names and descriptions, @task automatically creates another new blank line. When you submit a new milestone path, the blank line remaining is ignored. Also, you can adjust the order of the milestones in the list at any time using the arrow icons to the left of the milestone names.

You can only associate one task in any project with a milestone. If you want to use milestones to group a large number of tasks, then you should make a special milestone task. This task should be assigned to a project manager. Make each task that you want to associate with a specific milestone a predecessor task to the milestone task, and enforce the dependencies. When all the predecessor tasks are complete, the project manager should look at the predecessor tasks, then edit the milestone task duration to show whether the milestone tasks were on time or late, and update the milestone status to complete. In this way, you can use the milestone view to look at groups of tasks over multiple projects to see the trends.

To create a milestone path

1. From the Application Home page, click Project Management -> Milestone Paths, and then in the Contextual Menu, click New Milestone Path.

2. On the Milestone Path Details tab, type a name and description, and associate the groups with the milestone path. Other than administrators, members of the groups that you check are the only ones that can access the milestone path that you create.

3. On the Milestones tab, Type a name and description for each milestone. As you type, a new blank milestone line appears.

4. Click the color icon (

) to set the color for each milestone. Click on a color from the palette to select it. You can use the same color for multiple milestones if necessary.

To edit a milestone path

1. In the Contextual Menu, click Project Management -> Milestone Paths.

2. From the Milestone Path list, click the name of a milestone path to open it.

3. In the Contextual Menu, click Edit Milestone Path.

4. To delete an individual milestone, check the box in the Del column on the Milestones tab, and submit the change.

5. To delete an entire milestone path, in the Contextual Menu click Delete Milestone Path.

Associating a Milestone with a Task

When you create or edit projects, you can select a milestone path to associate with it. Then you can associate specific tasks with a milestone when you create or edit them. You can associate only one task with a single milestone.

SeeCreating a Project

SeeCreating a Task

You can also use the Metric Worksheet to associate milestones with tasks. When using the Metric Worksheet, you see a list of tasks that you select and associate with a list of milestones. The Metric Worksheet lets you associate milestones all at once rather than having to open each task individually to associate it with a milestone. Figure 3.17 shows an example of a Metric Worksheet.

To access the Metric Worksheet

1. From the Application Homepage open a project by clicking Project Management -> Projects, and then clicking the project name.

2. Open the task list for the project.

3. Highlight the tasks that you want to display in the Metric Worksheet by clicking the check boxes next to them. Use keyboard controls with your mouse to select multiple tasks.

4. Click the Metric Worksheet icon(

5. From the Milestone column, select a milestone for a task. A milestone can only be associated with one task in any single project.