Adding a Milestone
Howard specified in request #70486 that the approval from the steering committee needs to have been obtained within the next 4 weeks. That is an important milestone for your project.
Use the Gantt chart to add this milestone after the 3rd task. You can do this on the left side. When you hover your mouse cursor over the + Add Task… option, you will see that 4 icons become available. Click on the one with the diamond (the 3rd icon) to add the milestone. The subject of the milestone should be ‘Project Initiation Completed’.
After you have entered this subject and pressed the Enter key, a big diamond representing the milestone is added to the Gantt chart. Make this milestone the successor of the task ‘Approval from steering committee for project implementation’ by drawing an arrow between this task and the milestone.
To set the deadline of this milestone to 4 weeks from now, simply drag it to the right. Alternatively, open the milestone by clicking on it and manually specify a date and time in the Deadline field.
Questions:
Why is it helpful to add milestones to projects?
As you have seen in this exercise, the deadline of a milestone can be defined manually. When the first task of a phase is assigned and this phase includes milestones that do not yet have a deadline, the deadline is automatically set to the greatest completion target of its predecessors.
Setting the deadline of a milestone fixes its position in the Gantt chart. When the predecessor tasks experience delays or are completed earlier than anticipated, the successor tasks move to the right or left in the Gantt chart, but the milestone will remain in place. This allows the project manager to instantly see whether or not the project phase is still on track.
Would it not have been better if the milestone had been included in the project template?
Absolutely. This exercise is included to demonstrate that it is easy to adjust the project plan, even if it was generated by applying a project template.
The plan for the initiation phase of your project is now ready. It looks realistic. Even if there are some delays, you should still be able to complete this phase in time. There is just one more thing to check before starting this project. Let’s do that in the next exercise.