Criteria 1 of 9: The Last Milestone

Target milestone: Do you know your target?

Philosophy

The first thing I do when I see another PjM's schedule, is look for the last milestone: the date when the project needs to be completed. More often than not, this milestone is listed. And it seems basic enough that this target date should be listed, right?

Well, yes, it tends to be listed in the project schedule. But sometimes, they make two mistakes with the milestone:

• Non-zero duration: it shows up as a task rather than a milestone. A milestone is a task that has a zero- day duration. And some PMs incorrectly specify the task as having a non-zero duration.
• Missing deadlines: Another common mistake is to leave out the deadline constraint for the milestone

Non-Zero Duration

This is a technicality that does make a difference when filtering for milestones. A task automatically becomes a milestone when you specify the duration as 0 days. Obviously, you can make a task that is five days long as a milestone by double-clicking on the task > Advanced tab > Check "Mark task as milestone."

But from a project management perspective, a milestone is like being pregnant. It's a binary condition: either you're pregnant or you're not. You can't be 25% pregnant. It's either 100% complete or 0% complete. That's why you use milestones in the first place: to clearly indicate that you've reached a key point in your project.

Besides, setting a milestone with a zero-day duration automatically marks the task as a milestone. Try creating a task with a zero-day duration, filter your schedule for milestones and you'll see what I mean. To filter for milestones, click on Project > Filtered for > Milestones. Only milestones will be displayed in your schedule.

Missing Deadlines

Another common mistake with milestones is leaving out a deadline constraint. Double-click on milestone in your schedule > Advanced tab > Deadline.

Do you have a date specified as the deadline in this tab?

If it says NA (not applicable), then you're losing out on an automatic warning alert that MS Project displays when a milestone is projected to miss a deadline. We'll talk later about the red diamond alert that is displayed for late milestones. So key point here is to specify a deadline for your major milestones.

On one project that I was on, the PM realized on a nine-month project that he was going to miss his delivery date only a couple of months before the due date! If this PM had specified a deadline for his final milestone, he would have been alerted months in advance by the MS Project red diamonds. On my weekly status calls, as the project team gives me new ETAs on slipped tasks, the whole team immediately sees the impact of that task on the delivery date.

A simple but very useful early warning feature in MS Project to forecast missed project completion dates.

Do I have a good schedule?

Confused by the schedule? There's only a few rules to follow to ensure that a project schedule makes sense

Philosophy

While not all team members on a project team need to understand a project schedule, it should be simple enough that a PM (Program/Project Manager) who is completely unfamiliar with the project is able to look at a schedule and figure out basics such as key milestones, view the critical path, etc. Some of the schedules I've seen, while good enough for the PM managing the project, is really difficult for other people to read.

I've been on projects where by the middle of a four-month project, the milestones are still missing predecessors & successors so critical paths are incomplete, red diamonds don't display even though the milestones will be missed, half the project contains ghost tasks, etc. If none of these points make sense, it'll become clearer in the upcoming blogs.

It may make sense at the beginning of a project to have an incomplete schedule, when a lot of the tasks needed to flesh out the schedule have not been identified. So yes, schedule development is a knowledge creation process: you learn more about the tasks needed to complete the project as you get deeper into the project. But by the middle of the project, you better have 90% of your schedule compliant with the content & presentation criteria below.

On my projects though, I typically have my schedule compliant with the criteria below at the beginning of a project even though I may only know 50% of the tasks needed to complete. You really don't need to know 100% of the tasks to have a good schedule. For me, a "good" schedule is one compliant with the following content & presentation criteria.

Content criteria

1. Do you know the requested date for the last milestone (here)?
2. Are there 3-7 milestones (duration = 0 days) in the entire project (here)?
3. Are milestones strategically positioned throughout the schedule?
4. Do milestones have deadlines assigned to them?
5. With the exception of the last milestone, are all milestones family tasks?
   • Family task = task with predecessor (parent) + successor (child)
6. Is the final milestone a sterile task?
   • Sterile task = task with parent but no child task
7. Are there only non-ghost tasks at the task level (i.e., non-summary tasks)?
   • Ghost task = task with no parent or child task
8. Is there a justification for having every single sterile task?
9. Is the info column clear of red diamond icons?
   • Red diamond = task will not meet assigned deadline

Presentation criteria

1. Are the following columns displayed?
   • Info
   • % complete
   • Start
   • Finish on Time
   • Task Name
   • Duration
   • Start
   • Finish
   • Predecessor
   • Successor
   • Resource Names
2. Do the project's main phases visually stand out?
3. Do late finish indicators show only green tasks?
4. Do light-bulb indicators show active tasks?
5. Are only incomplete tasks displayed?
6. Do all summary tasks have a maximum of seven tasks?
7. Are all major phases in the schedule visually separated from the rest of the schedule e.g., using highlighting?
8. Will tasks in the critical path for a milestone automatically turn red when a milestone deadline will be missed?
9. Do all summary tasks contain a maximum of 5-7 tasks?

The presentation criteria is somewhat subjective. You may have your own presentation style. But what I'm listing as the criteria is what I've compiled over the last 15 years from other PMs who have had schedules that were easy to follow.

In the coming months, I'll blog in detail about why each criteria helps make your schedule simpler and easier to follow.

Notes - Format your Notes

Format Who & When: Make your notes visually stand-out

Beautify Who & When

This is an optional item that you could do to make two pieces of info in your notes tab (see Record Date & Source) visually stand-out. Format the who & when pieces of info so it doesn't feel like you're reading a wall of text. It barely takes a second to switch formatting in the notes tab.

• [CTRL] + B --- toggles bold formatting
• [CTRL] + U --- toggles underlining

Admittedly, the value-add for formatting the notes is small. It's a nice-to-have visual aid that improves readability (as you can see from the screenshot above).

Notes - Record Date & Source

Who & When: All your notes should specify who said what and when they said it

Who, what and when?

Some PjMs (Project Managers) do a good job recording what was said but not who or when that comment was made. This creates the problem of figuring out how long a task has been open or if notes are too cryptic, who we can contact to understand the task.

As you can see from the above screenshot, I always include three pieces of info in the notes tab of MS Project:

• What was the comment made about the task?
• Who was the source of the info?
• When did he make the info?

Keeping the notes tab well-documented is actually not time-consuming at all. It takes me less than 30 minutes a day per project to ensure all active tasks are updated (see Update Daily).

Another benefit of this tab is that it proves extremely valuable whenever projects are transitioned to different PjMs. There's been times when I've handed my project over to a new PjM. And while I dial into the status call to support the new PjM, because of the notes tab, the new PjM is able to conduct the weekly call without any help from me. The notes tab provides a rich source of high-level info for PjMs to get up to speed on a task very quickly.

On the other hand, when I take over projects, I have to hold multiple knowledge-transfer sessions with the team to get context on the hundreds of line items in a schedule.

Notes - Update Daily

Update notes daily: Updating the notes tab in your project schedule is a MUST to stay on top of your project

An update a day ...

I normally spend at least 30 minutes a day updating the notes tab for active tasks. I don't wait for the weekly status call to make updates. Rather, as emails or conversations occur around active tasks (tasks with light-bulbs), I copy and paste snippets of notes into the notes tab.

I've found this very useful in getting a much deeper understanding of a task. Think about it: info will obviously be easier to remember if you're actively connecting emails and conversations back to specific tasks in a schedule AND you're pasting that info into the task notes section.

I've had directors challenge me on why a task has slipped or why the task is important and within less than 30 seconds, I'm able to skim through the notes tab for the task and give him a good answer. I've even been able to use the notes section to remind task owners what they had committed to weeks or even months earlier.

In fact, I make it a point to ensure that I only move emails out of my Outlook inbox into a a project folder only after I've copied a snippet of that email and pasted it into the notes tab for that task in MS Project. Obviously there are some emails that delve too deeply, technically, into an issue. So I don't copy info from those emails into the notes tab.


Bottom line: This 30 minute daily task for each project schedule helps ensure your schedule is always up to date. And your schedule will thus be a very convenient source of info for creating meeting minutes, weekly reports, etc.

Notes - Record Notes for Tasks

Memory like an elephant: Project Managers don't need the memory of an elephant to remember the details of each task in a schedule

PjMs are Information Managers

Most PjMs (Project Managers), of which I am one, have to juggle four to six projects a week. And each project may have several hundred line items in the schedule. And on weekly calls with stakeholders, we're expected to remember the details of each line item for literally hundreds of line items per project.

Many PjMs manage this info by recording notes in weekly meeting minutes (docs or emails) that they then send out. I personally dislike this approach since now you're increased the places where info is stored. For a 30-week project for example, you now have project info scattered between the project schedule and 30 emails. And then, on status calls, PjMs bring up the previous week's meeting minutes to identify what happened to a particular task. Or they leverage the knowledge of a task owner who is on the call to remind everyone what happened with that task and identify next steps.

And once they're done creating the meeting minutes, they may switch to the project schedule and cover the necessary line items pertinent to the call. And this does a dis-service to the schedule since new tasks were identified in the meeting minutes that were not added to the schedule. Or dates and deadlines have changed which have to be updated by the PjM after the call (wasting his limited time). And what's worse, stakeholders don't always see the connection between topics discussed on the call and the relevance to the schedule. Remember, people on the call are multi-tasking (or surfing the web) and so won't be actively trying to connect the dots.

One of the tasks of a PjM is information management. And a good PjM should be able to manage all this info to make it more palatable.

Put all info in your schedule

The way I manage all this information is to use the Notes tab for the task in MS Project. During my status call, the primary document that everyone sees is my MS Project schedule. We review all active & late tasks (see Show Active Tasks & Keep Tasks Green) by checking the notes tab for those tasks.

1. Access the notes tab by double-clicking on a task > Notes
2. Record notes from a status call live as team-members provide status
3. Click OK to save notes
4. The notes icon appears in the information column to indicate there's more detailed info about that task

I record notes for a task during my status calls live so my team sees what I understood as well who made those comments. This way, my team will correct me if I've misunderstood the conversation around the task. But I don't just wait for weekly status calls to make updates to the schedule. I also paste email snippets into the notes tab on a daily basis.

I've found pasting email snippets to be extremely helpful in connecting the ton of emails I get to the project schedule. In fact, when I find emails discussing a task that's not recorded in my schedule, I create a new task as a result of that email.

Bottom line: You should be able to connect all conversations, status calls, emails, etc the project schedule by pasting a snippet of that discussion in the schedule. If not, you're missing a task in your schedule.

How do I display open tasks?

Shortcuts are faster: Only display active tasks in your project schedule by filtering for incomplete tasks

Philosophy
One of my pet peeves is, during weekly Webex status calls, a Program/Project Manager (PM) displays his project schedule and he continues to display all the closed or completed tasks i.e., tasks that are 100% complete. While this may not sound significant, remember that one of the tasks of a PM is information management. And information management is the art of delivering (or displaying) only the key information that stakeholders need to see. I certainly don't like having to visually wade through tasks that are no longer relevant to the project. PMs should only display open or incomplete tasks (i.e., tasks that are less than 100% complete).

Or if you need the research of why less info is more to be convinced of the benefits of keeping things simple (kinda like Apple products), check out this book "Made to Stick." This books explains beautifully why some ideas stick to people's minds and others do not. One of the six core elements of making ideas (or in our case, schedule info) sticky, is to keep it simple. Yes, KISS!

Steps

The screenshot above shows how MS Project makes it really easy to display only open (incomplete) tasks. There are two ways:

1. Point & click: Project > Filtered for: Incomplete Tasks > Incomplete Tasks
2. Shortcuts: [ALT] + P + F + N

How I display open tasks 
My favorite way, because it's the quickest, is to use the shortcuts. When I'm walking through the schedule with my project team, I typically have the tasks already filtered to display only open tasks. But every now and then, I've had to display all tasks (open & closed). Because I've practiced it so much, my fingers automatically hit [ALT] + P + F + A (to display all tasks). And once I'm done showing my team the closed task they had asked about, I automatically hit [ALT] + P + F + N (to filter on only open tasks).

Or when I've closed out a task by marking it at 100% complete, my fingers automatically hit the shortcut to hide the closed task. A closed task should be hidden the moment it's been marked as closed. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Try practicing both these shortcuts for a few days to make it come automatically to your fingers.