Critical path - milestones

[Vijay]

Is it neccessary for all the milestones in a project to be on critical path?
Can somebody help?

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

No, not at all. Why would they?

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
+32 495 300 620
For availability check:
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/Calendar.pdf

 

[Vijay]

Hi Jan,

Just one more help. Can you please let me know some important milestones
which need not be on critical path. I feel we there should be no issue in
having some milestones out of critical path.

But my manager feels all the milestones should be on critical path and he is
asking me for specific examples. Request you to share if you have any..and i
will also find out..

Thanks for ur help.

 

[Steve House]

There is really no standard set of milestones that must exist in every
project, other than the recommended practice of always having a "start" and
"finished" milestone, so it would be hard to answer your specific question.
Other than start and finish, everything else is a judgement call, the
milestones indicating some noteworthy events that take place during the
project. The "critical path" is defined as that sequence of tasks and
events that determines the project duration - if anything on it is delayed,
the project finish is delayed. But "critical" doesn't have anything to do
with "importance." If you track the completion of key deliverables with
milestones, as in very commonly done, and yo have several parallel chains of
tasks running through the project, only those deliverables that lie on the
longest path are critical. Thus any milestones that occur on the other
paths are non-critical, by definition.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Vijay,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

I think you (or your boss) need to understand a bit more about Critical Path
or Network Analysis. You might like to have a look at my series on Microsoft
Project in the TechTrax ezine, particularly #1, at this site:
http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc or this:
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMFrame.asp?CMD=ArticleSearch&AUTH=23
(Perhaps you'd care to rate the article before leaving the site,
Thanks.)

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

There is really no standard set of milestones that must exist in every
project, other than the recommended practice of always having a "start"
and "finished" milestone, so it would be hard to answer your specific
question. Other than start and finish, everything else is a judgement
call, the milestones indicating some noteworthy events that take place
during the project. The "critical path" is defined as that sequence of
tasks and events that determines the project duration - if anything on it
is delayed, the project finish is delayed. But "critical" doesn't have
anything to do with "importance." If you track the completion of key
deliverables with milestones, as in very commonly done, and yo have
several parallel chains of tasks running through the project, only those
deliverables that lie on the longest path are critical. Thus any
milestones that occur on the other paths are non-critical, by definition.

--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs

Hi Jan,

Just one more help. Can you please let me know some important milestones
which need not be on critical path. I feel we there should be no issue in
having some milestones out of critical path.

But my manager feels all the milestones should be on critical path and he
is
asking me for specific examples. Request you to share if you have
any..and i
will also find out..

Thanks for ur help.