Criteria 4 of 9: Deadlines for Milestones

Deadline hanging over you? A good schedule needs to have deadlines hanging over every milestone

Deadlines are your schedule's fuel-gauge

Milestones are meant to serve as early-warning detectors (see Placing Milestones Strategically). So it shows good project management skills when a PjM (Project Manager) specifies milestones with deadlines. The benefit of a deadline constraint is that two visual indicators appear the moment tasks for a future milestone will be missed:

• red diamond: this icon appears in the info column
• red tasks: predecessor & successor tasks in the critical path for this milestone turn red (will cover how to make the critical path turn red automatically in a future blog)

Having a visual indicator sounds like a small benefit. But think of these visual indicators like the fuel gauge & the fuel gauge indicator on your car dashboard. Remove those two indicators and you'll have to constantly worry about whether your car is running out of gas. You'll have to constantly read the odometer to see if you need to fill up the tank.

A PjM without the deadline constraint in the milestone (and the resulting red diamond & tasks) will be analogous to the driver constantly reading the odometer instead of the fuel gauge. He'll have to read the dates for hundreds of tasks in his schedule. On all my projects, I always specify a deadline on each of the seven milestones (see Do You Have Too Many Milestones). And so I see automatically, rather than manually searching, missed milestones months in advance.

Create deadlines for milestones

As the screenshot shows, setting a deadline is fairly straightforward and takes only a few seconds to set up. So really, there's no excuse for not setting up deadlines on your seven or so milestones.

Fig. 1: Make sure all milestone tasks have deadlines specified

1. Double-click on a milestone task
2. Go to advanced tab
3. Specify a date for the field Deadline

Bottom line: Spend a minute or so on your schedule to ensure that all your milestones have deadlines