We all have milestones in our lives, those events that stand above the norm leaving an indelible mark on our memories. Being old enough to join the cubs, leaving school, passing a driving test, getting married and, for a lucky few, winning millions on the lottery are examples of milestones that mark significant points on the tapestry of life. As we all know what milestones are, we are well on our way to understanding milestones as used in Microsoft Project.

Rather than birthdays or weddings, Project milestones reflect a significant event within the project. This could be the completion of one phase of the project or the arrival of supplies to begin a new stage. By inserting milestones the manager can evaluate the status of the project and see if everything is running to schedule or not.

To keep it simple I will refer back to one of the sets of tasks I used in my article on dependencies last month. There are two tasks

Task 1: Remove wrapper from chocolate
Task 2: Eat chocolate

Task 2 cannot begin until Task 1 has been completed. When the wrapper is removed that task is completed and the project can move on. We can mark this event with a milestone to indicate that the removal of the wrapper has been successfully completed and it need no longer be a concern. First we need to insert a new row so we can create our milestone.

In the Task Name column select the row directly below the one where you want the new task to appear. Click on Insert and then New Task. This will open up a new row between the two tasks earlier mentioned. We need to give this new row a name and, since it is an event rather than a task, we could call it Wrapper Removal Completed. There are two ways we can now convert this task into a milestone, the first of which is manually.

When you have entered the name of your new row you will see that the duration is set to the default 1 day. This is incorrect as we are noting an event rather than a task and so its duration must be zero. To change this double click on the new task row and view the Task Information dialog box that appears. Click the Advanced tab and select the Mark task as milestone box, then click OK. This will insert your milestone, indicated by a small black diamond shape.

A simpler way to insert a milestone and set the duration to zero is to select the duration column on your new row. When you select this you can enter a new value for the duration either by typing it direct or using the up and down arrows. Set this value to zero and a milestone will automatically appear.

A project plan without milestones could cause confusion. These handy markers show significant events within the project at a glance; where a particular phase of the project was completed, or any number of other events. As I have shown they are extremely easy to insert and, without going overboard, a project plan marked with many milestones allows greater ease in seeing exactly where things stand.

I hope that this article has demonstrated that MS Project is not the fearsome application it may sometimes appear to be. By learning different aspects of it in bite-sized chunks you can gradually become a master of this extremely powerful and useful tool.