Set Deadlines for All Milestones but not All Tasks

 Is more better? Maybe. Adding deadlines to tasks in addition to milestones MAY be good to do in some cases. In general, add deadlines to regular tasks only IF there's a need

Use deadlines sparingly

There are very strong reasons for following this rule: Add deadlines for ALL milestone tasks (see Deadlines for Milestones). But I don't really have a strong reason for following this rule: Add deadlines only IF needed for non-milestone tasks.

My philosophy here is one of simplicity. Adding deadlines for milestones is trivial and easy to manage since there are typically only 5-7 milestones. But adding deadlines for non-milestone tasks takes more time since there are hundreds of line items in my typical multi-million dollar, 6-12 month projects. Besides, milestones with deadlines with the correct set of predecessors will automatically identify the non-milestone tasks in the critical path.

However, there have been times when I have specified deadlines for tasks. This would be when a task had a resource constraint: e.g., project members were going to be on vacation and would not be available to support a vendor with testing and training. The key tasks weren't major enough to be turned into a milestone since it didn't mark the end of a major phase. Since I had a real deadline on this task, I specified a deadline on a non-milestone task. And thus tasks in the critical path for that key task would turn red if anything slipped (even if the milestone itself was not impacted).

Bottom line: Specify deadlines for non-milestone tasks only IF necessary

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