Project 2016 for Beginners Part 13: How to Set Project Milestones in MS Project 2016

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During this Microsoft Project 2016 training tutorial video, we will demonstrate the process of setting milestones, which are useful in denoting significant events in a project and giving a realistic summary of the key points in a project. We will also show you how to filter the timeline so that what will be shown are all the milestones.

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Welcome back to our course on Project 2016. In this section we’re going to look at Milestones. And Milestones are used to denote significant points or events in a project. Usually milestone tasks have zero duration but Project 2016 does allow milestones with non-zero durations as well. Milestones are used for a number of different purposes.

And amongst the most important ones are as a way of providing a management snapshot of progress on a project. So there is for example a particular report called a Milestone Report where you can just view the key milestones in the project and get a summary of where you are in terms of those milestones which in turn gives you a good idea of general progress on the project. They can also be used to show you what’s coming up next, what’s happening say over the next week or the next month or the next few days.

And very often milestones are associated with a payment schedule of some sort. So for example, when a particular point is reached in a project there may be a payment to make. Now what I’m going to do with the wedding project is to take some of the existing tasks and turn them into milestones. And I may well introduce one or two new milestones as I go through. Before I start note what I’ve done with the project at this stage. This is version 03 of the project. I have collapsed all of the summary tasks.

Note that when I do this you can’t see all of the dependencies. So for instance, there is a dependency between a task in Wedding day and the setting of the wedding date. But because Wedding day is collapsed you can’t see that link. If I expand Wedding day that link is now visible Note the link from Book wedding venue, task 40, up to Set wedding date. But when Wedding day as a summary task is collapsed you can no longer see that link. So this just emphasizes the point that when you’re looking at a project with some summary task collapse you need to be careful at what you’re interpreting because some elements of the project may have become invisible even though they’re actually quite significant.

Now one very important aspect of Milestones is that generally speaking although I should say there are exceptions, but generally speaking because a milestone is a task of zero duration it is assumed that there is little or no work associated with the milestone itself. If I take task 4 here, Set wedding date, if that doesn’t actually involve any significant amount of work I could make it into a milestone. But what I’m actually going to do on this occasion is to insert specifically a milestone which indicates when that task has been completed. So I’m going to select the task below it which is basically a blank row and then on the Task Tab in the Insert Group I’m going to say Insert Task.

Now that task I’m going to rename to Wedding date set. So that’s basically a statement that something has happened. It isn’t something to do itself. And then in the duration for that task I’m going to change it to zero days which will make it into a milestone. And the default notation, the default symbol in a Gantt Chart for a milestone is a diamond. So now I’m going to select Set wedding date and select Wedding date set and link them in the usual way. And I have my first Milestone in my project.

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Видео Project 2016 for Beginners Part 13: How to Set Project Milestones in MS Project 2016 канала Simon Sez IT