Last time, I talked about Project Tracking through Milestone Management, and how to set up a structure in your project plans where you could track a defined set of milestones. Today, I will move onto Part 2 of the series, and discuss techniques to view and track these milestones across projects. There are a few different ways of viewing milestones across projects, depending on whether you are using Project Standard or Project Server.
Master Projects One way of being able to easily see Milestones across projects is to use the concept of a Master Project, which represents a grouping of projects in one file. The easiest way to create a Master Project is to open all your projects you would like to view within MS Project, choose Window, New Window, select the projects from the list, and click OK. This will open up a Master Project with the individual projects you selected as sub-projects. What you can now do is review milestones across projects, by using a filter to look at all tasks that are assigned a Milestone Indicator value (which we talked about in the Part 1 of this series). 
If you are using Project Server 2007, you can publish the Master Project you just created. The Project Center in Project Web Access will allow you to click on the Master Project, and then see a complete view of the entire Master Project, including the details of the individual subprojects. I recommend you have a pre-configured Project View that automatically filters for Milestones, which you would be able to see in this Master Project view.
SQL Reporting Services If you are a Project Server 2007 user, you already own the licenses for SQL Reporting Services, which is a reporting tool which can be used to build nice-looking custom reports that pull data directly out of the Project Server database.
The report here shows all projects along the left hand side, and the consistent set of milestones on the top. Within the report itself, the baseline/forecast, and actual dates are shown for each milestone. This is a powerful report that can be used to easily track milestones across your enterprise.
If you are using SQL Server 2005, you can create something called a Report Model which allows end users to drag and drop their own reports! In addition, these reports can be set up on a subscription model to automatically email reports to end users on a pre-defined frequency.
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