Project: change milestone % automatically when precedent % change

Question

Hi Community

Context:

I’ve a moderate complex project (~5000 tasks) for a SW development transformation project. It contains tasks from several teams, aggregated by core business  processes (eg., Customer Acquisition, order entry, billing, etc), in different systems (e.g. Web platform, back-end, integration, etc).

In this project, and for a high level management view, I’ve a section containing only milestones (e.g. SW development start, SW development end, tests start, tests end,…), having as precedents the detailed tasks from each business process / team / system.

Question:

Is there a way to automatically change the % of the milestones, as the % of its precedents change? Currently I’m doing this manually, but inevitably sometime I’ll miss one update, and then I’ll reporting incorrect progress to top management.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Alternatively, we achieve the intended outcome by creating a pseudo milestone group task.

Create a pseudo milestone task under each core business group main task (this should be super task of all activities under that business group). Then insert a new text field (with any name) and this can be filtered to to show the progress % in each core business group. Also help to show progress across all business groups (but may not show overall project level progress but still useful to know progress group wise).

Answer 2

luis.2016,

Keep in mind that by definition a milestone is a point in time so either you reach the milestone or you don't (i.e. 0% or 100%). But to answer your question, as Dale noted, there is no automatic way to "link" completion of tasks to a milestone's completion but it could be done with a macro.

John

Answer 3

Luis --

No, there is no way to do this in Microsoft Project. You must manually updated the % Complete of each milestone task individually. Hope this helps.