In WeTrack, tasks and milestones are used together to help you manage your projects. A milestone is a special kind of task with additional attributes you can use for project tracking and reporting. Milestones always have the same start and end date, meaning their duration is always zero days. This distinction leads us to the key difference between a task and a milestone:
- A task represents a specific piece of work that needs to be accomplished during a project.
- A milestone is a marker of a significant achievement during a project, or a key point in time where an objective is expected to be met.
In this article:
- How do tasks and milestones work together in a project plan?
- Use dependencies to link tasks and milestones
- Categorize Milestones
- Add and Manage Milestones
How do tasks and milestones work together in a project plan?
Tasks and milestones are used together to create your project schedule. Typically you would have a series of tasks that lead to a milestone. Once all the tasks are completed, the milestone is achieved.
An example of a milestone could be Venue use agreement signed. The tasks that lead to that milestone would be:
- Draft venue use agreement
- Negotiate venue use agreement with venue
- Prepare final draft of venue use agreement for execution
Once those steps are completed and the agreement signed, the milestone has been achieved.
Use dependencies to link tasks and milestones
When combining tasks and milestones in a project plan, it makes sense to use dependencies to link the items together. This way, if a task leading to a milestone turns amber or red, the milestone owner will be notified. This would help you take action to ensure the milestone remains on track.
In the Gantt chart, each task is shown with a square or rectangle while each milestone is a diamond. Arrows show the dependencies between the tasks and milestone.
See Using Gantt to track your milestones, and learn how to Create dependencies in the Gantt. You can also create dependencies from a Task Details Page.
Categorize Milestones
When creating a milestone, the WeTrack system offers three categorizations or levels: Gold, Silver and Bronze. These can be renamed depending on your organizational needs (see Configure Milestone Names). Generally these categories relate to the level of monitoring and importance of the milestone. A typical project will have many milestones, with some more important than others.
By categorizing milestones according to their importance you can then tailor your reporting so that milestones are monitored at the correct level. As an example, a milestone like Sample menu tastings complete may only need to be monitored by an individual project manager, but Catering service delivery contract signed likely needs to be monitored at the executive level.
Add and Manage Milestones
Milestones are a type of task that has a milestone category/level. Because of that, milestones have all the functionality of tasks, including assignments, tags, RAG status, and more. Milestones are added using the Add Task functionality; choose a milestone category/level to create a milestone. See Add Tasks and Milestones for detailed instructions to add milestones, as well as other task articles about available functionality.