Milestones/Steps

If a work package uses the Milestones progress technique, you can define milestones and their weights each time you enter cost information about the work package. If a work package uses the Steps progress technique, you can define steps for the work package.

You cannot define milestones or steps for a control account because Cobra does not calculate earned value at that level. Steps do not require dates.

Although some project managers may want to define milestone/step weights as percentages that, taken together, add up to 100%, Cobra does not require this approach. Instead, Cobra sums the entered values and calculates the relative weighting factor for each milestone/step. For example, if you set up three milestones/steps and assign each a weight of 1, Cobra assumes that you want to earn a third of the work package budget each time a milestone/step is achieved. This method of calculating weighting factors is particularly useful in cases where you want each milestone/step to represent a dollar portion of the work package budget.

Because most earned value management systems insist on a direct relationship between a work package budget and its earned value, Cobra notifies you if there is more than a 5% variance between how a work package budget has been spread and how its milestones/steps are weighted. If a variance of this size is detected, you can either reconcile your milestone/step weights to the budget or adjust the weights manually. If the milestone/step varies more than 5% from the budget, a warning message is displayed. This budget variance can be changed to any value besides 5 for the entire project.

The default milestone/step-weighting value is 3 digits, which yields the sum of the milestone/step weights equal to 100. If the value is 4 digits, it will yield the sum of the milestone/step weights equal to 1000. The default factor is 100.

How Milestone/Step Weights Are Calculated

When you choose to reconcile milestone/step weights, Cobra calculates the weight of each milestone/step based on the budget associated with that milestone/step.

• Cobra calculates the first milestone/step weight by taking the budget that is spread from the beginning of the work package until the first milestone/step, dividing it by the total work package budget, and multiplying the result by the milestone/step weighting factor.
• Cobra calculates subsequent milestone/step weights by taking the budget that is spread between the previous and next milestone/step, dividing it by the total work package budget, and multiplying the result by the milestone/step weighting factor.
• If two or more milestones have the same scheduled finish date, Cobra divides the final weight calculated for the first milestone by the number of milestones with the same finish date. This weight is applied to all milestones with the same scheduled finish date.

When you load a budget from a schedule or an import file, all of the baseline data for the work package is loaded and the milestone weight is calculated using the same formula as the reconciliation.