Top 3 - How to get started with Milestones

Hi everybody, it’s Cynthia Boone, your On-Demand Workfront CSM, and I’m back today to talk to you about Milestones. I’ve talked about Milestones before and other events, and I really like using Milestones for reporting. Let’s get straight into it. Now, the first thing that you’re going to need is you’re going to need to start with setup and create a Milestone process, and you’re going to need a system admin for this. If you’re not a system admin, go find your favorite system admin and ask them to build that. When they go out there into setup, they’re going to go to processes and they’re going to go to Milestone Paths. When they get there, they might find that there’s a bunch that just aren’t turned on so you can take a look at them. But for this, I created a standard Milestone Path, and it’s very basic, but when you see it in the reporting, I think you’ll see why I did it this way. First things, you’re going to create it, assign the group, then literally what’s the name, what’s the color.

Then that next step is actually head to your projects. I would recommend that you head to your project templates so that you’ve already attached it to your project template. So anytime you create a new project, you actually have that Milestone Path that you just made attached to all of your projects. I have this project template up and you can see in the Milestone view, like which ones that I’ve assigned, like for example, this is project initiation. So I assigned the Milestone, the first one, project initiation of that one. You can choose whatever way you want to do it, but you’re going to have to assign which Milestone you want with which task.

How do you assign that Milestone to your project or your project template? Well, you do it in your project details. So we’ll go in here and what you’ll see is this is template settings. You can see that I have the Milestone Path here, or if you’re in an actual project, it’ll be under project settings. In an actual real project, check it out. I’ve got some real life project, I’ve got a Milestone column on a project so I can see which Milestones, and then I’ve got my regular tasks assignments, all the other stuff.

What is the point of all this? The point is the number one thing is for your reporting. This is the reason I feel so strongly about Milestone Paths and amazing reports, they’re beautiful, they’re highly detailed, and some of our end users are executives, they’re not following the message. With a Milestone report, it’s pretty obvious what message you’re trying to send. Here’s where it is, especially if you’re using a color of red, is like not doing great, green, we’re close to the finish line. So if you’re using that color scheme and they can see is it late, is it on time, what’s happening with the project. This was a real savior for me. You could also build this report just like I did, there’s only three projects on here. Just the projects that are important to that leader showing that Milestone view. So I hope I’ve convinced you to at least give it a shot, communicate out, and show where your projects are in a very easy to digest way.

See you next time on Top 3. Bye everybody.