Milestone as Range of Dates
It would be very helpful to us to have the option of a milestone task as a range of dates.
Many of our projects include 2-3 days of training with a client. These are scheduled events we have to plan our projects around. It's confusing to our users to use a milestone since it only signifies one day. But when we use a regular task for this training item, the gantt chart can easily get messed up when adjustments are made because of dependencies related to the training task.
Thanks!
Karina Fluker A milestone should really only consist of one day. If I had a project schedule that consisted of a training session like you were referring to then I would have a milestone that represents the start of training. From there if I wanted a task to represent all three days of the training then I would create that task after the milestone and set the milestone as a predecessor for the task. This way if your schedule slips or adjustments need to be made then your training milestone will be maintained.
John Bibbs - I thought this suggestion may be a little too radical to suggest 🙃 But I really think it makes sense for projects with events.
Yes - in Wrike - a milestone is only one day. But the purpose of milestone dates is to represent dates that will not be moved, even if other tasks in the project get off track. That's what these events are for us. And trying to use a combination of a single day milestone with connected tasks gets a little messy... it won't be easy to show this combination of dates on dashboards or calendars (most of our regular users rely on Dashboard views of everything.) If we have an agenda for the event, would it have to be split up between the milestone and other tasks or appear on both or only one? If we use custom fields for information - would this be spilt up between both? / have to be applied to both? ... it's just not ideal.
Yes - it may seem at face value to not be conventional. But if the set of dates are an actual milestone, I think this suggestion matches the spirit / purpose of a milestone task to have the ability to represent the range of dates and are the only way I can figure out how to really represent the events on a dashboard view.
Hi Karina Fluker, the PMBOK defines a milestone as a significant event in a project that occurs at a point in time. Trying to add work time/duration to a milestone is where it would no longer be considered a milestone. Now, what you could do is have a task (representing your training) with a start constraint indicating the start of your training session so that task should stop floating. I would also then end that task with a milestone indicating the end of the training window. See my attached screenshot on how I set that up in my Wrike as an example.
John Bibbs - I'll test that out. Thank you for the suggestion!