Tracking % complete for numerous milestones by defined tasks.

[Finius Eetch]

I'm having difficulty finding the best way to get % complete information back
on various milestones. I'm able to see when my entire 'project' will be done
and what % of it is done. What I want, however, is a bit more visibility.

For example I have the following milestones defined at the top of the
schedule.

Pre-Alpha
Alpha
Pre-Beta
Beta

Under that I have

Project
ProtoType
Programming
Production
Quality Assurance

As I update all the child tasks, my "Project" % complete tells me when
Project will be done. What I'd like to do is link back specific child tasks
of Prototype that make up my Pre-Alpha, Pre-Beta, Beta, Alpha milestones,
etc. to the top so when I load my schedule, I can see that I'm 'x%' towards
completion of Pre-Alpha, 'n%' towards Alpha, 'z%' towards pre-beta, etc.

Almost as if I was assigning them predeccessors - but they were 'these tasks'
assigned to this 'milestone' so report the progress total of those taskss.

What I do not want to do is move all the tasks under each milestone - which
would
give me the same information, but i'm trying to group all tasks by type, not
by deliverable, but I still want deliverable information.

Man, hope this made sense
F.E.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Finius,

Reading your message isn't easy - maybe that's why getting an answer took a
while.
Fact is that it's better to use Project's vocabulary: that way your message
will be easier to understand.
What you call milestones are (I guess) summary tasks since you cannot have
"tasks under milestones"

Then from what I understand you need the grouping feature. Look up and see
if I'm right?

HTH

 

[Steve House]

A milestone is an event that marks a major transition in the project. For
example, a "contract approved" milestone is an event that marks the status
change from "contract not yet approved" to "approval received" and its date
is driven by how long it takes to do all the stuff needed to get the
contract approved. In your case, "pre-alpha" would be the event that marks
the end of whatever the sequence of tasks would be that make up the
pre-alpha phase of your project. So create a summary task "Pre-Alpha
Phase," indent under it all the tasks that go into the pre-alpha work as
subtasks, link them in the order the process requires them and at the end of
the chain, linked either to the last pre=-alpha performance task or linked
as a successor to the "Pre-Alpha Phase" summary task, put your "Pre-Alpha
Complete" milestone. Now the % Complete shown by the summary task
describing that phase of your project shows the % Complete progress towards
the milestone. By linking them the way I suggest, you not only get an
indication of your progress towards the milestone, as the links drive the
milestone date to change you also get a good forecast of the actual date you
can expect to achieve the milestone. If you've put deadlines on the
milestones, you also will get advance warning if it's slipping past its
"must hit" date early enough in the process to take corrective action to fix
the slippage.