Best to have both a start and end milestone as standard in allproject schedules?

[anovak]

Any comments on this? Both a start and an end milestone are common
in PERT charts.

I would think it would be advantageous in that say you set a start
date for your project then something changes. You can always set a
"Start no earlier than" constraint on the Start milestone to get the
same effect as changing the project start date - without having to
change the project start date.

Anyone agree or disagree with this proposed standard and why?

Thanks,
Andy Novak
UNT

 

[Rod Gill]

Firstly, by selecting Tools, Options then selecting the Project Summary task
option under the View tab you have a summary task for the project. This
automatically shows the start and end of the project making a milestone
redundant.

However, I always favor a milestone to start the project as this shows what
event triggers the start of the project. I use tasks like "Management
approval to proceed and resources made available" and I always print the
early Gantt charts with Month1 Week 1 time format so stakeholders clearly
see that the project will take X weeks after they approve the project and
provide resources. I never use a milestone to show the end of the project or
summary tasks, but if there is a go live event I have a milestone for that.

If a project start date changes, you should edit the start date under
project, project Information menu.

--

Rod Gill
Microsoft MVP for Project

Author of the only book on Project VBA, see:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

I often recommend start and finish milestones within work packages to avoid
the practice of linking summary tasks. But to be honest, I don't see much use
for a start milestone of the project nor for a finish milestone.

-Jack Dahlgren

 

[Ueli]

As already mentioned there is always an external trigger to start the project
(budget approval or whatever), and with a milestone at the beginning of the
project this is clearly visible. Besides I always have a last milestone
'Project closed', which ties up the last project deliveries (lessons learned
report, environment clean-up, document archiving etc.)

Advantages of using milestones:
First it helps avoiding unlinked tasks, which is considered best practice
and fundamental to dynamic schedulling and critical path analysis.
Second it's easy to produce milestone-filtered reports. In fact, a report
containing all the milestones but without one for the project start and one
for the project end just doesn't make sense.

Hope that helps.