Planning milestones – don’t forget the deadlines!
The Milestones feature allows you to enter important project deadlines and link them to different parts of the plan. As soon as the date you set as a Milestone changes, the entire plan will automatically update in time so that everything linked to the Milestone is linked to it.
You enter dates from your contract with the client or dates you set yourself into Milestones. You don’t need to know the exact date of a specific activity, just know which deadline you need to meet and specify what needs to be done before or after it.
The milestones resulting from the contract with the client are also transferred to the list of important deadlines.
Contents
What is a milestone
A contractual date
Common milestone
Where to find the Milestones feature
How to work with Contract Dates and Current Milestones
Continuity of Contract Dates and Milestones
What is a milestone
A milestone is a point in the project timeline. It helps to keep track of the sub-contractual obligations in the contract, but also to set internal goals to be met in the project implementation. Let’s take a look at how to use milestones, edit them, anchor them in time, and link individual items from the project plan to them.
Milestones may be contractual or set by the project manager based on the project plan. The purpose of the Milestones feature is to help you keep track of commitments to your clients. In Navigo, Milestones are differentiated as Contract Date or Regular Milestone.
Both types of milestones can be linked to any part of the plan, e.g. subcontracts, allocations, future revenue, WBS etc. As soon as a date is changed or a commitment is moved in any part of the project, you will be notified of the change.
Contract date
The contract date is a milestone that follows directly from the contract with the client. They are also often referred to by terms such as: contractual obligation, contractual dates, deadlines, etc.
A contractual date is, for example, a contractually specified date for the start of the project, a date for handing over part of the work, an inspection day, the end of the project, a standstill, etc.
A common milestone
A common milestone is a point created by the project manager without that deadline or commitment being directly stated in the contract with the client. We can also call it an internal deadline for certain work on a project. The Current Milestone feature can be used to better organize project work and to internally monitor project progress.
Where to find the Milestones feature
If you open the project plan, you will see the Milestones tab. Click on it to edit, modify or add to each contract date or commitment.
How to work with Contract Dates and Current Milestones
When a project is created, Project Start and Project End milestones are automatically created, these milestones are created without specific dates.
Each milestone (whether it is a Contract Date or a Common Milestone) can be anchored in time, i.e. given a fixed date associated with the project. This commitment can be anchored in time in any of the following ways:
1. You don’t know the exact date
If the date of the sub-objective of the contract cannot be determined, it may be set as unknown in the project plan. For example, the contract does not show the start date of the project – then the milestone is set with an unknown date. This will be set when the date is specified.
2. You know the exact date
If you have a specific date or deadline for each phase of the project, simply set it within a specific project milestone.
3. Date precedes another date
In this case, you don’t know when a milestone (e.g., meeting an important commitment or milestone in the execution of a project) will occur during the planning and execution of the contract. You only know that it will occur before another (reference) milestone.
For example, you know that the inspection day must occur before the project is closed. Optionally, you can also set the number of days before the reference milestone. If the reference milestone has a date, this date will also be displayed for the new milestone.
4. The date must follow another date
This case of scheduling contractual obligations is similar to the previous option, but allows you to set a milestone for a different contractual date or a current milestone, i.e. towards the future.
For example, if the date of the control day is known, the project can be set to end 14 days later.
Continuity of Contract Data and Current Milestones
In Navigo, individual contract dates and common milestones in the contract can be linked. This allows you to create a project plan that always updates itself when the milestones change, making it much easier to organize your work.
For example, you don’t know the start date of the project, but you know that the whole contract will take 3 months, with an inspection day 14 days before completion. You then proceed by setting up the following milestones (in Contract Date mode):
1. Project start – set the date as unknown.
2. Control day – set 14 days before the Project Completion milestone.
3. Project End – set 90 days after the Project Start milestone.
If you enter milestones in the project plan in this way, each of them will show a question mark in the date column, but they will be sorted correctly to keep the implementation of your job under control.
Once you know the project start date, just set this date in the Project Start Milestone. This will automatically calculate the dates of the Control Day and Project Completion milestones.