Many customers design Integrated Master Schedules in Milestones and keep them up to date with dates from project management tools such as Microsoft Project or Primavera P6. Milestones Professional offers everything needed for a presentation ready schedule and uniquely provides what is needed to distill the tens of thousands of tasks behind a multi-million dollar project into a one page Integrated Master Schedule ready for presentation.

We are often asked to give advice about “best practices” for creating and maintaining a one or two page presentation master schedule. This article suggests ways to make your efforts run smoothly.

Tip #1: Use a Unique ID that is truly unique

If you are updating your Integrated Master Schedule from more than one Microsoft Project or Primavera schedule, use either WBS number or a text field for the unique ID field. If using WBS, be sure that the WBS numbers are not duplicated on the schedules you are using to update the IMS.

Tip #2: Milestones on one row can use multiple unique IDs

For a compact presentation schedule, you may want to display several task finish dates on a single row. For example, the milestones on this project reflect finish dates of several projects.



Tip #3: When showing multiple tasks on a single row, it’s possible to show several dates for each task

You may have such a large project that you need to show multiple starts and stops, including baseline dates on a single row. To prevent overlap, you may want to show tasks on different levels of the same task row and make symbols smaller if you think they might overlap. Several symbols in the toolbox are designed for this purpose. Example on right.


Resources available on kidasa.com to support your efforts updating Integrated Master Schedules can be found here:
Create Presentation Reports For Microsoft Project
Create Presentation Reports For Microsoft Project (PDF)
Create Presentation Reports For Primavera

You may want to associate text with a symbol in your toolbox.

Milestones Professional and Milestones Simplicity offer two ways to associate text with a toolbar symbol:
• Set up a single letter marking
• Use “default text”

Set up a single letter marking

Single letter markings are great when space on your presentation chart is at a premium.

1. Double click any symbol in the toolbox
2. In the space labeled Letter Marking, enter a letter, number or symbol.
 
On the right are some examples of letter markings. In this case the S signifies Start and the F means Finish. The A and B events are for documentation deliveries while the inverted triangles are for contract deliveries.

Use Default Text

With default text, it’s possible to have up to 3 lines of text associated with any toolbox symbol. It can be text you enter, or text from one of the 20 columns in Milestones.

1. Double-click the symbol in the toolbox.
2. Choose the Default Text tab.
3. Enter text or choose a column to insert.

In the example to the left, default text is assigned to the red triangle symbol in the toolbox. The text from the Name column is assigned to Line 1; the word Finish is assigned to Line 2; and the text from the % column is assigned to Line 3. When the red symbol is added to the schedule, the default text appears automatically.


Learn More

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Question:  I prefer the old menu system and small toolbar icons.  Is there a way to switch back?