Milestone

In LeanCPM, a milestone is a significant point or event in a project that marks the completion of a primary deliverable or phase. It represents a clear checkpoint in the project timeline and is used to track progress and ensure that the project stays on schedule. Milestones have zero duration. Milestones play a more significant role here than they do in legacy CPM.

Milestones are used to calculate the early and late dates for tasks and issues.

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Dependencies

Since Milestones represent a point in time when something can or will start or finish, they can only be in series with issues or tasks. This means that milestones cannot occur concurrently with their dependencies.

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Target Dates

Like tasks, milestones have target dates that the planner manually sets. These dates are used in the schedule calculation and thus drive the Early and Late dates for their dependencies.

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Deadlines

Deadlines are different than Target dates. While Target dates represent your near-term objectives, Deadlines represent the project’s goals, typically defined at the project’s inception or after a significant change resets expectations (e.g., an approved change order that alters the project’s end date). Deadlines are not used in schedule calculations; they are provided for reference purposes. Deadlines should fall between the early and late dates.

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Why deadlines instead of late dates?

It makes sense that the latest possible date for a milestone is the deadline. However, the late dates (and early dates) are calculated based on the “Substantial Completion” Milestone.

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Early and Late Dates

Since milestones are used to set early and late dates for tasks, their early and late dates must be calculated differently. In essence, these are the exact early and late dates from legacy CPM.

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Start Milestone

Start Milestones occur the day after their blockers are finished, and the same day as their blocked task’s start. These have the following fields:

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Types

Types are an optional field for Milestones. We recommend that software vendors ship their applications with some pre-defined fields. This enables organizations to track the progress of their projects in relation to those of others. Some potential default milestone types:

• NTP (Notice to Proceed)
• Construction Start*
• Foundations Complete
• Top Out (Superstructure complete)
• Permanent Power
• Permanent Air
• Dry In
• Substantial Completion*
• Turnover
• Inspection

Each milestone should be of just one type, however each type should be allowed to be used more than once.