Milestone Reporting

Hi @KIMBERLY REA‚ , am wondering how this turned out; has it been viable for your teams or leadership? We"re not using the baseline feature and am curious how this went before spending time going down this potential rabbit hole.

Skye thank you so much for posting it! I will definitely try to set something like that for my company. Marta Marta Sowa

Narayan, thanks! You and I are in agreement, the Milestone view in reporting isn't showing the right information and can't be configured to do so. But it's pretty. And for some teams that's almost more important. The colors and the way everything is distinguishable really makes it nice to use. The compromise is, you just have to only want to see what's there. :) -skye

hi Kimberly, For us it ended up being a compromise. The way automatic baselines works is that Workfront sets a new default baseline whenever certain conditions are met (e.g. if the PM takes the project into Project Setup and then back to Active status). Most times, we really only want to look at the Original baseline, the one that was automatically set the first time this happened. This is why i mentioned above, as a note to Workfront: it would be nice if the automated baselines functionality worked differently. Our workaround was to leave the automatic baselines functionality turned on. We instead ask for the commitment of our PMs that at the end of the project, they go into the baseline tab and re-set the default baseline to what it"s supposed to be. And we use the resulting data as historical analysis of how our projects went. Yes: it"s a little more admin work. It"s one more task at the end of the project template that says "set your default baseline before you close your project", and I definitely agree that Project Owners have a lot of these little admin steps. We"re fortunate that leadership sees the value in doing this step, and that our project owners are all really great people. Ultimately we do have teams that would like to use this as more of an in-the-moment tool, to see milestones shifting over the life of a project. Changing the way automated baselines behave would go a long way to making this possible. Frankly I haven"t been able to think of a reason why it"s beneficial to have the default baseline automatically changing -- but that"s just because we so strongly need for it to behave in the way I mentioned, because that"s just how our projects work.

@Skye Hansen thank you for providing such a thorough and powerful summary of how custom forms on tasks can be used to identify milestones for much better reporting than what the native project "Milestone" view offers. I've never been able to settle on that view because it's completely non-configurable. @KIMBERLY REA , adding to what Skye suggested, you can build a project report and, using the ""https://wf-pro.com/textmode/text-mode-views-collections/#milestone-tasks" Task Collections " example, pull in milestones and associated data as columns in the view.

Skye, This is so great. Thank you for sharing your success. I've copied it to my OneNote to review this week and see if I can produce a report for POC for the leadership. I'm going to look into automatic baselines as they aren't using them as much as I'd like to have them used but if we can get the first one set automatically then we can see the difference in the timelines. How did you get the teams to keep up with baselines and shifting timelines? We're having some push back on the amount of admin work they see it as. (I personally know it's not admin work but that's the perception). Kimberly Rea Schneider Digital Solutions Manager

forgot to say: in the view column - for the field1 column this is set up to aggregate by average, and that also drives the bar chart :) -skye

sure thing. It"s not difficult but there are a lot of steps and dependencies so bear with me and I"ll just try and sketch out how it works. 1) please note: the only reason I went with this approach is because users specifically wanted to see reporting charts (bar charts). 2) the setup involved the following: * commitment from the PMs to set a baseline when they set the project to active. You can visit Workfront"s help site to find out more about setting up baselines and make your own determination about whether you want to set these up manually or automatically, and if automatically, how to determine which baseline is the most meaningful. Note to Workfront: it would be nice if the default baseline didn"t keep shifting to the newly created baseline, in automatic situations. * creation of a milestone path and milestones. Because we wanted to see the milestones in a specific order (i.e. from start to finish) and because they were showing up in alphabetical order instead, we named the milestones starting with a number. e.g. 01 Project Kickoff, 02 Design, 03 Creative Review. This produced a bar chart showing milestones in the following order: 01, 02, 03, 04. * creation of a task custom form to collect specific data: calculated field (Field1) for the weekdaydiff between the default baseline planned completion date and the actual completion date of the task, and calculated field (Field2) saying "if this difference is >1 then it"s late" (i.e. if it"s more than a day past, then it"s actually late, otherwise you have a day of wiggle room.) * attaching the milestone path to relevant project templates, milestones to template task, and task custom form to relevant template tasks. (since we wanted to give the PMs every opportunity to rearrange their milestones, we just put the form on all tasks and set it up as a recurring task form in case the PM wants to create more tasks and attach milestones to them) 3) creation of reports: these are all task reports. Since we"re interested to show late information, we filter on "Field2 = late". We"re interested in milestones, so we filter on "milestone ID not blank". We have in the View a column for field1, so that anyone looking at the details tab can see exactly how many more days it took. We group by milestone name to produce the actual bars. Put in any other filters you need here, like looking for projects whose status equates with active/complete, or tasks that are not cancelled or skipped. Whatever makes sense from your workflow"s POV. From this point you can duplicate this initial report to make your variations, so that you can look at milestone data in various teams, or templates, or PMs, or from a time standpoint (e.g. each quarter), or whatever else makes sense: these would all be different reports with slightly different, additional filters. Hope that helps--if not, any remote consultant would be able to walk you through these steps in 1-2 hours.

Can you share how you're doing that report? That's exactly what we want to show. We are hoping digital proofing will reduce the cycle time of business review. Get "https://aka.ms/o0ukef">Outlook for iOS

Hei Jill Could it be possible to see a reference overview? If possible. Mvh Kundan Kundan Kumar KGON (Kverneland Group Operations Norway AS)