Standard Practice: Milestone Placement & Linking Tasks

[Gary Furash]

I wanted to toss this out and see what the "best
practice" was for the following:
1. Milestone Placement
For a milestone representing the completion of a task and
its subtasks, do you typically place it indented under
the parent task as the last task, linking it to all of
the child tasks, or after, linked to the task. The
latter is easier but I've seen it done both ways.
2. Task v subtask linking
When essentially linking two subtasks from different
tasks, do you link the successor to the predecessor
subtask or the predecesor's parent task. The latter is
easier, but the former is probably more accurate.

 

[JackD]

I wanted to toss this out and see what the "best
practice" was for the following:
1. Milestone Placement
For a milestone representing the completion of a task and
its subtasks, do you typically place it indented under
the parent task as the last task, linking it to all of
the child tasks, or after, linked to the task. The
latter is easier but I've seen it done both ways.

Why not use the last date of the parent task as the milestone date?
Adding an extra milestone seems redundant.

2. Task v subtask linking
When essentially linking two subtasks from different
tasks, do you link the successor to the predecessor
subtask or the predecesor's parent task. The latter is
easier, but the former is probably more accurate.

Avoid using links to summary tasks unless necessary. They can make debugging
and tracing dependencies difficult.

-Jack

 

[Guest]

Thanks, Jack.

#1 makes for nice milestone reports. You're right, it's
redundant, but for whatever reason, milestones seem to
work in my org for communications.

#2 is good advice (though I've been doing it the other
way forever).

 

[JackD]

You know that you can format a task to look just like a milestone.
Go to format menu / barstyles and set the bar for summary tasks to nothing
and the end symbol to be a diamond.
Then it will look just like a regular milestone.

-Jack