Conundrum - Multiple Go LIve Milestones in one project

[RobertGo]

Trying to work with this constraint: one milestone can only be assigned to one task at a time in a project. Looking for the best approach to this. 1) Add the maximum # of Go Live milestones that one project might contain, to the milestone path. This will mess up Milestone reporting, which we do use, pushing the colorful milestone boxes off the page. 2) Break up all projects so that each project has only one Go Live event, and introduce managing projects by Program, and or cross-project dependencies. That may prove to be too complicated for most of our PMs. 3) Some middle ground to (1) and (2), e.g., allow up to 3 Go Live milestones in one project; if there are any more - create more projects, or have PMs "roll" forward a completed Go Live milestone to the next Go Live event. We have asked PMs to set a Go Live milestone in each Current project, so that we can plot them on a calendar. Some of our projects deploy the same system to mulitple locations, which then include mulitple Go Lives in one project. Some projects deploy to 16 locations for example.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Robert, I invite you to read my Going The Extra Milestone blog post, which I presented several years ago at the User Conference; it seems similar to the constraints you're describing, and might give you some ideas. Regards, Doug

[EricLu2]

Hi: We found that because WorkFront limits you to only one occurrence of each milestone in a project, we no longer use their Milestone functionality, regrettably. There are a number of other features that use the WorkFront milestones (like Gantt charts) that we cannot take advantage of. I like these two options (and discard the others as being too problematic): 1) Break up your project structure, so that you have (your number 2, below): a. Create a program for the effort; b. One main project that does all the creation, proofing, testing, and certifying readiness to put into production; c. Have one small project for each Implementation; d. Associate all projects to the program; e. That way, each physical project will only have one WorkFront milestone of “Go-Live”; 2) Create a custom attribute that is applied to every task (we called ours “Standard Milestone”); a. Now you can assign any milestone as many times as you want; b. We have reports (Milestone Reports) that show all go-live events, grouped by week or month; c. We cannot use the built-in capabilities that use WorkFront milestones, but that hasn’t proven to be too much of a problem; Hope you are able to arrive at a solution quickly! Thanks, Eric

[MartyGa]

This has been a continuing condundrum for us as well. We've approached it a bit differently. We still use one implementation milestone, then have multiple go-lives detailed under it. the milestone isnt hit until all golives are complete. We use a custom data element (check-box or Yes/No) at the task level to identify a go-live task. We have our PMs use this flag in conjunction with a parent task if there are multiple go-lives and have them name the go-live appropriately by location, department, division, or whatever makes sense. The milestone is still at the parent task level for multiple go-lives. This allows improved reporting of the go-lives by being able to pull them into a calendar by filtering tasks on the flag. We also recently set up a matrix report with the planned start date (summarized by month) across top and the project name and task name down the side. It pulls in the planned start date in the data area. I have to admit, I was surprised it worked at first. The only oddity is that it doesnt export to excel, so to pull it out of WF we do a copy paste.

[RobertGo]

Doug, Eric, Marty, all great advice. Thank you. For simplicity I now favor keeping just one Go Live milestone per project. To meet our goal of plotting Go Live events on a calendar, for those projects with multiple Go Lives, I'm now considering introducing your technique of having PMs with those projects identify tasks that are additional Go Live events in a project. Then I will retrain our Go Live calendar to include those tasks too. PMs can continue to structure their projects as they see fit (within our standards of course). We get to keep the built-in Milestone reports usable. And most PMs around here may find using programs and especially cross-project dependencies a "bridge too far. Now to go "sell it." Thanks again.