Milestone Tasks

Milestone Tasks

Life is full of milestones – and so are projects. When planning a project, aside from laying out the tasks that take us from beginning to end, we’re inevitably going to want to mark key dates along the way. One easy way to do this is through the use of a diamond shaped symbol in our Gantt chart, the milestone. Milestones not only help our team to stay on track, they are also useful to us as a project manager to more accurately determine whether or not our project is on schedule.

Milestone tasks in Microsoft Project are defined as any tasks with a duration equal to zero or a value of Yes in the milestone field. In general, a milestone is a task that represents a significant date in a project, such as the completion of a project phase, or the date a particular report is due. For Microsoft Project to be aware that a particular task is a milestone, its milestone field must be set to Yes. Microsoft Project sets this value to Yes automatically for any tasks we enter with a duration of zero. To create milestones out of nonzero duration tasks, use the method appropriate for our version of Microsoft Project. 

Incorporating milestones in our project planning helps us and our team keep sight of:

• Key Dates: Launch parties, board meetings, product rollouts and other key dates mark significant pieces of our project. It’s also helpful to include other one-day events unrelated to our project specifically that are still important for our team to keep in mind–like a group offsite or team holiday.

• Key Deadlines: Key deadlines are important to surface on large project plans so our team can easily see what’s coming up and plan accordingly. For example, the date that website development is completed or when customer conference registrations need to be returned to qualify for early bird pricing. Key deadlines are related directly to our project but they aren’t project tasks. Use a key deadline as a milestone to reflect when a section of tasks or key task is completed.

• External Dates and Deliveries: For example, a due date for a deliverable we are expecting from an agency, the date when our hiring manager has received an offer letter, or the day that pipes are scheduled to be delivered. These key events can affect when other tasks in our project are allowed to start. They may also be used as predecessors in our plan.

How To Create a Milestone

A milestone is an important date or event that we can include in our project sheets, reflected as a diamond symbol in our Gantt charts.  

• Make sure our project sheet has dependencies enable.

• On a new row in our project, write a brief description of our milestone in the task name column (Company Off Site, Registration Materials Due, etc).

• In the Start Date column, enter the date of our milestone.

• Enter a Duration of zero.

Add a Milestone

Create a Milestone With Zero Duration

The quickest way to create a milestone is to add a task with no duration to our project plan.

1 Click View, and then in the Task Views group, click Gantt Chart.

2 Type the milestone name in the first empty row or pick a task we want to turn into a milestone.

3 Type 0 in the Duration field, and then press Enter.

The milestone symbol is now part of our Gantt Chart.

Add a Milestone With a Duration

Sometimes a milestone takes time. For example, the approval process at the end of a phase might take a week, so that milestone would need to take place over time like a normal task.

1 Click View, and then in the Task Views group, click Gantt Chart. 

2 Type the milestone name in the first empty row or pick a task we want to turn into a milestone.

3 Select the milestone, and then click Task. In the Properties group, click Task Information.

4 Click the Advanced tab, and then type the milestone duration in the Duration box.

5 Check Mark task as milestone, and then click OK.

On the Gantt Chart, the milestone symbol appears on the last day of the task. It doesn’t appear as a bar, even though it has duration.

Add an External Milestone

Sometimes we might need a milestone to track a task that’s outside the scope of our project.

• If the milestone depends on a project that is beyond our control, such as software that is being developed by another company, create a milestone using the steps in the previous section. We’ll have to keep an eye on the external task and update it manually.

• If the milestone is part of a project in our organization, we can track it with a cross-project link.