Milestones/Steps
If you select a progress technique of milestones or steps, you can define the milestones or steps within the work package. This allows you to have longer work packages and still objectively measure the progress within the work package.
When you add a milestone or step, you also enter a weight. When you complete the milestone/step, you earn that percentage of the budget. The only difference between milestones and steps is that milestones allow you to add a date. The date on the milestone is not used in the progress calculation.
You can also select the project preferences option Allow entering milestones regardless of Progress Technique to enter milestones on any work package. These milestones will be ignored during calculate progress. This option is useful when entering quantifiable backup data associated with the work package.
The only difference between milestones and steps is the ability to add a date for a milestone. Steps do not have dates. Both steps and milestones use a weight to determine the progress to be earned when an actual date is entered for the step or milestone. Similarly, if you have the Allow percent complete on milestones/steps option selected on the Project Preferences tab of the Project Properties dialog box, you will be able to enter a % complete for the milestone or step and earn a portion of the value.
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.
To help progress calculations to equal budget when work is progressing as planned, 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 weight by taking the budget (sum of the currency results) that is spread from the beginning of the work package until the first milestone.
- It then divides this budget by the total work package budget and multiplies the result by the milestone weighting factor.
- For subsequent milestones, Cobra takes the budget that is spread between the previous and next milestone.
- It divides this budget by the total work package budget and multiplies the result by the milestone-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 then applied to all milestones sharing the same scheduled finish date.
When you load a budget from a schedule or import file, all baseline data for the work package is loaded and the milestone weight is calculated using the same formula as the reconciliation.