Project Tracking through Milestone Management - Part I

Many Project Managers are very good at creating a solid WBS-based project plan with estimates and dependencies.  However, these project plans often get put ‘in the drawer’ while the project is being executed, never to be seen again.  Why?  Because many project managers are intimidated by Microsoft Project, and once the project is in the throes of execution, they feel that the project plan is just too much work to maintain.    There are of course many dangers in this scenario: without good project tracking, it is almost impossible to tell whether the project is really on track, and often it becomes too late to fix the situation once the project becomes derailed.

If your organization is in this situation, I recommend starting out simple with a Project Tracking process that is based on managing milestones.  The setup and the process is described below.  In a future blog, I’ll discuss two ways you can report on these milestones across projects.

Milestone Management

In order to do Milestone Management, it is important to standardize a set of milestones across all your projects.  I recommend tracking no more than 10 milestones.  Ideally, a milestone would be tied to one of two things: either each of your major project deliverables (e.g. Design Document Finalized, System Test Plans Complete, etc.), or the end of each of your lifecycle stages (Analysis Complete, Design Complete, etc.).

If you don’t have a common set of milestones, don’t underestimate the time it takes to develop and socialize this list.  If you’ve been working in a decentralized mode for awhile, different groups will have their own milestones and definitions.  Reconciling this long list of milestones will take some time and effort, as will the training behind the definition of each milestone and when it is applicable to the project.

Once you have come up with a standard list, I recommend creating a Task Level custom field called Milestone Indicator that is set up to have a dropdown list with your list of milestones (see picture).  If you are working with Project Standard, you can create this custom field in the template you commonly use, and you can instruct your Project Managers to use the Organizer (under Tools, Organizer) to move this custom field to their Desktop.  If you are working with Project Server, you can create the Milestone Indicator as an enterprise field.

Then, create a project template and insert the Milestone Indicator into a view.  Populate the Milestone Indicator for the rows where you want to denote that particular milestone.  The screen capture here shows a very simple project plan that has a handful of tasks and some milestones that are cross-referenced to the ‘standard’ milestone via the Milestone Indicator.

You may also want to use some color coding (using Text Styles) to call those rows out, so that project managers don’t delete those rows.

Then, once you are done, you can make this template available to your Project Managers to use for their project plan development.  Instruct your Project Managers to pay special attention to the milestone dates and make sure they are always up to date, and reflect the current reality.  Also have them baseline their project plans so that you can use the various views within MS Project (such as Tracking Gantt) to specifically view the baseline against the current date for each of those milestones.

This approach will allow your Project Managers to focus on a key set of important criteria as well as common terminology which will make the tracking process much simpler.  Of course they will need to keep their plans up to date in order to keep their milestone dates current – that is the idea, of course!  As I mentioned, in a future blog, I’ll talk more about how to view and track these milestones across projects once you have set up the process to track them. 

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