Jack Wallen explains what milestones are in project management and how to add them in Ora.
When most people think of milestones, they think of those passing moments or events that denote important times in a life – graduating from high school, the first day of college, getting married. In project management, milestones serve a similar purpose, as they point to specific points in the project life cycle used to measure progress toward the goal.
Project management milestones include things like start and end dates, beta testing, external reviews, budget checks, deliverable submissions, important meetings, and release dates. Another important aspect of milestones in project management is that they serve as reference points for significant events or branching decisions.
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Milestones are an essential aspect of project management and also one where you need to have a clear understanding and collection of milestones that are important to your project and your business.
The big question now is, are you using milestones? If not, you should start integrating them as soon as possible. In most project management platforms, milestones are a fairly easy-to-use feature. I want to demonstrate this fact with Ora task management application. If you’ve just tried Ora, you might consider doing something like import your tasks from Trello to facilitate testing.
What you’ll need to add milestones in an Ora-managed project
To work with milestones, all you need is a valid Ora account. You can use the free or paid version and the web or desktop app. I’ll demonstrate it on the desktop app, but the process is the same regardless.
How to add your first milestone on the desktop app
Before we show you, know that milestones should be well thought out and created before the project even kicks off. You can add milestones at any time, but they will work best if created during the planning stages of the project.
Whether you add milestones early or during the project lifecycle, here’s what you do.
First connect to your Ora account then open the project in question. With this project open, you should see a toolbar on the right side of the main window (Figure A).
Figure A
The milestone icon is fourth from the top and looks like a sign.
Figure B
Click New Milestone and when prompted (Figure C), give the milestone a name.
After naming the milestone, you can also select an associated planned date by clicking Planned Dates and selecting the required date from the pop-up window (Figure D).
Figure C
Click Create and your milestone is ready.
One quirk I noticed with the Ora desktop app is that you can create milestones but they don’t show up. If you create milestones on desktop, check the web version and you’ll see they’re clearly there. For this reason, I recommend that you do it on the web version, which is done the same way as on the desktop version.
How to associate a milestone with a task
Suppose you have a particular task directly associated with a milestone. To attach a milestone to a task, open the task card and you should see the Set Milestone drop-down menu. Click on it and select one of the milestones you just created.
Now that you’ve taken care of that, you can, for example, filter tasks by milestone and close a milestone when all related tasks are complete.
Take the time to implement milestones into your project management and you will find that the workflow is much easier to follow and will be more effective and efficient. After all, the goal is to work smarter, not harder.
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