In MS Project (and most project management software) the Milestone deliverable is offered. What is a Milestone?
Wikipedia says "... a milestone is the end of a stage that marks the completion of a work package or phase, typically marked by a high level event such as completion, endorsement or signing of a deliverable, document or a high level review meeting."
I like this statement, I do agree that milestones are great for events/work that is either so short a time association makes not sense or so abstract that again a specific timeframe is not required or justified (such as signing or acceptance, where the task is really the review, etc). Other than this, I think milestones should only be used to connect phases to another (since linking summary tasks is problematic, if not completely wrong) and completion. In the former case, sometimes deliverables do not logically flow from one to another.
A well placed milestone can solve that issue. In the case of the latter, a milestone can be used to tie phases to another in the same way that they can be used to tie deliverables.
What I think is wrong is using a milestone for every deliverable. If you build a deliverable oriented WBS (a future topic), excessive milestones should not be required.
Just my two cents.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment