Looking for a “Program” Level Milestone Chart that is automated
Lorrie SmithProject Management/Business Analyst| TEKsystemsNovi, Mi, United States
Looking for a “Program” Level Milestone Chart that is automated and will:
• Provide “swim lanes” for high level milestones for each project in the program.
• Provide connections (lines / arrows) between milestones in different swim lanes to depict a dependency.
• Is automated. Saving Changes...
Can you provide more details about what you mean by automated? MS Project can certainly easily handle the first two requirements, but the automation one needs further clarification.
Lorrie,
Like Kiron ask What do you mean by "Is Automated"?
Any serious Project management software possibly, at least for your two first requirement. Saving Changes...
Lisa BarwiseSenior Project Manager| Provinicial GovernmentNanaimo, British Columbia, Canada
I am on a similar quest as Lorrie. I have a half a dozen technology and process mixed projects coming up (2-3 years in length) that are all competing for what comes first and what has more priority, along with the complexity of trying to change how 30K people work. I want to diagram on one page how they link and clearly demonstrate the dependencies. I only have MS Office for tools and I have used Visio in the past for such things. Having said that, my skill level is moderate if I’m bragging, and my outcomes are not that impressive or clear. I’m looking for examples or templates others have used that might be helpful. Is this the wrong place to post this quest? Saving Changes...
Yes I am unsure what the "automated" part is referring to exactly. Saving Changes...
Lorrie SmithProject Management/Business Analyst| TEKsystemsNovi, Mi, United States
Answer to what is meant by automated:
Imagine that you have several swim lanes each representing a project. Each swim lane has milestones. You need to enter the date and description (may be as much as 100 characters) for each milestone. The entry of the milestones (date & text) is in a list (maybe a different tab/worksheet if this was done in Excel). These milestones are linear across a time horizon, as is typical with any project.
In addition, there are relationships between milestones in different swim lanes, which are depicted by lines between the milestones involved in the relationship. The lines between milestones IN DIFFERENT SWIMLANES may be another list or tab / worksheet.
If you move the date on a milestone it moves to the appropriate position on the time horizon, while also maintaining the inter swim late connections.
By the way, the audience for the final output (graph) is an executive level team. Saving Changes...
Based on the above, I believe standard MS Project functionality using the Gantt chart & timeline view would likely meet your needs.
You could track all projects within one master schedule, and filter by milestones if the underlying detailed tasks weren't required. You could flag specific key milestones to show up in the timeline view.
