Milestone Reporting

we're using them hand in hand with the baselines functionality to be able to track issues with milestone planned dates moving once we've started the project. By calculating the difference between the original planned completion date and the one we had to change it to (to accommodate the project timeline), we can chart how late various milestones are hitting and better speak to where the roadblocks are. (e.g. Creative review milestone always has to get changed: do reviewers know when to stop reviewing?) -skye

Hi, Skye could you please advise what are you pulling to this milestones report? one of my manager is looking to display milestones completed late but I've never build that type of report. Thanks Marta Marta Sowa

Hi Skye, When calculating the difference, have you used text mode. Since I am also looking such guidance, I used it before but missing some info. Thanks and Regards Kundan. Kundan Kumar KGON (Kverneland Group Operations Norway AS)

I use milestones to make calendars (though the calendars have other issues).

Hei Jill Could it be possible to see a reference overview? If possible. Mvh Kundan Kundan Kumar KGON (Kverneland Group Operations Norway AS)

Can you share how you're doing that report? That's exactly what we want to show. We are hoping digital proofing will reduce the cycle time of business review. Get "https://aka.ms/o0ukef">Outlook for iOS

sure thing. It"s not difficult but there are a lot of steps and dependencies so bear with me and I"ll just try and sketch out how it works. 1) please note: the only reason I went with this approach is because users specifically wanted to see reporting charts (bar charts). 2) the setup involved the following: * commitment from the PMs to set a baseline when they set the project to active. You can visit Workfront"s help site to find out more about setting up baselines and make your own determination about whether you want to set these up manually or automatically, and if automatically, how to determine which baseline is the most meaningful. Note to Workfront: it would be nice if the default baseline didn"t keep shifting to the newly created baseline, in automatic situations. * creation of a milestone path and milestones. Because we wanted to see the milestones in a specific order (i.e. from start to finish) and because they were showing up in alphabetical order instead, we named the milestones starting with a number. e.g. 01 Project Kickoff, 02 Design, 03 Creative Review. This produced a bar chart showing milestones in the following order: 01, 02, 03, 04. * creation of a task custom form to collect specific data: calculated field (Field1) for the weekdaydiff between the default baseline planned completion date and the actual completion date of the task, and calculated field (Field2) saying "if this difference is >1 then it"s late" (i.e. if it"s more than a day past, then it"s actually late, otherwise you have a day of wiggle room.) * attaching the milestone path to relevant project templates, milestones to template task, and task custom form to relevant template tasks. (since we wanted to give the PMs every opportunity to rearrange their milestones, we just put the form on all tasks and set it up as a recurring task form in case the PM wants to create more tasks and attach milestones to them) 3) creation of reports: these are all task reports. Since we"re interested to show late information, we filter on "Field2 = late". We"re interested in milestones, so we filter on "milestone ID not blank". We have in the View a column for field1, so that anyone looking at the details tab can see exactly how many more days it took. We group by milestone name to produce the actual bars. Put in any other filters you need here, like looking for projects whose status equates with active/complete, or tasks that are not cancelled or skipped. Whatever makes sense from your workflow"s POV. From this point you can duplicate this initial report to make your variations, so that you can look at milestone data in various teams, or templates, or PMs, or from a time standpoint (e.g. each quarter), or whatever else makes sense: these would all be different reports with slightly different, additional filters. Hope that helps--if not, any remote consultant would be able to walk you through these steps in 1-2 hours.

forgot to say: in the view column - for the field1 column this is set up to aggregate by average, and that also drives the bar chart :) -skye

Skye, This is so great. Thank you for sharing your success. I've copied it to my OneNote to review this week and see if I can produce a report for POC for the leadership. I'm going to look into automatic baselines as they aren't using them as much as I'd like to have them used but if we can get the first one set automatically then we can see the difference in the timelines. How did you get the teams to keep up with baselines and shifting timelines? We're having some push back on the amount of admin work they see it as. (I personally know it's not admin work but that's the perception). Kimberly Rea Schneider Digital Solutions Manager

@Skye Hansen thank you for providing such a thorough and powerful summary of how custom forms on tasks can be used to identify milestones for much better reporting than what the native project "Milestone" view offers. I've never been able to settle on that view because it's completely non-configurable. @KIMBERLY REA , adding to what Skye suggested, you can build a project report and, using the ""https://wf-pro.com/textmode/text-mode-views-collections/#milestone-tasks" Task Collections " example, pull in milestones and associated data as columns in the view.