MS Project: milestones

[judy]

I have many groups that create project plans for the activities within their
specific area of expertise that all must fit together into one plan. So I
know that I create plans that I roll up into a master. However, what I need
to know is, is there a way to enter milestones in the master project plan and
have them propogate to the sub plans, or do I have to enter the same
milestones into each sub-plan and then roll them up into the master. It
would be much easier for me to enter them at the master plan level and have
each subplan address, rather than have to enter into 9 different subplans and
run the risk of missing one... anyone know how to do this if it's possible?
thanks

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hello Judy,

You'll have to create each milestone in the master plan and in each of the
subplans which need it.
Then create a FS link between the masteplan milestone and the subplan
milestone.

Gérard Ducouret

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Before you dispair at the extra work, consider what a milestone is. Many
people think it is a date by which something should happen but that's not
really true. Nor is it a date where you intend to report to a client or
evaluate whether to proceed, etc. Instead, the milestone is an event that
takes place in the project. It occurs on some date but the milestone is not
the date, it is the event that occurs on that date.

Let's say I'm creating a new video game. There might be a milestone
"Storyline complete" and it takes place on whatever date we finish the
storyline. That milestone may have deadline, say 15 May, that we have to
hit in order to have the game to market for the Christmas season but the
milestone is finishing the storyline, not the 15 May evaluation point. What
this means is that in your subprojects, you're going to have milestaones
that are unique to each subproject anyway and it would be very, very rare
for those milestones to occur on the same date or at the same duration point
into the project.

What you *could* do to minimize the work, and would be a very good idea if
the subprojects are similar in structure, is to create a template to base
each of them on and that template would have to signifigant events in the
project entered as milestones. Now when you create the subproject file
based on that template, each one will have the "design complete" or whatever
milestone in it just like it has the other tasks and Project will calculate
the date that the event takes place in that particular subproject. If that
meets the deadline, great. If it doesn't, you need to tweak things like
staffing, etc, to get it to move to the required spot. What you can't do,
in any circumstance, is simply declare it'll happen on some certain day and
expect it to actually happen then when you leave the planning stage and go
out and do the work - the real world just doesn't work that way. You might
assert "design complete" happens on 15 May and use a constraint to force it
to sit on that date in your plan, but if it takes 6 weeks to do the design
and designing doesn't start until 01 May, that milestone will happen 15
June, a month late, no matter what your plan says.

Hope this gives you some ideas you can use...