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 difference between milestones and steps is that milestones allow you to add a date, while steps do not. The date on the milestone is not used in the progress calculation.

Note: When importing data from a schedule, milestones and steps may behave differently. For example, importing steps does not change the work package’s progress technique. For more information, see the “Behavior When Importing from Open Plan” section in How Cobra Loads Milestones or Steps Based on Progress Technique and Option Settings.

You can also select the Allow entering milestones/steps regardless of Progress Technique option on the Project Preferences tab of the Project Properties dialog box to allow milestones or steps to be entered on any work package.

• If this option is selected, milestones or steps can be stored on work packages that do not use the Milestones or Steps progress technique. In this case, they are treated as non-earning data and do not affect earned value calculations.
• If this option is not selected, milestones or steps are only available for work packages that use the corresponding progress technique.

This option controls whether milestones or steps can be stored on a work package; it does not change the work package’s progress technique.

Both milestones and steps use a weight to determine the progress to be earned when an actual date is entered for the milestone or when a step is completed.

If you select the Allow percent complete on milestones/steps option on the Project Preferences tab of the Project Properties dialog box, you can enter a percent complete value 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.

Although some project managers may want to define milestone or step weights as percentages that 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 or step.

For example, if you define three milestones or steps and assign each a weight of 1, Cobra assumes that each milestone or step represents an equal portion of the work package budget.

Cobra notifies you if there is more than a 5% variance between how a work package budget has been spread and how its milestones or steps are weighted. This threshold can be changed for the entire project.

The default milestone or step weighting value uses a factor of 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.

First Weight Calculation

• Cobra calculates the first milestone/step weight by taking the budget (sum of the currency results) that is spread from the beginning of the work package until the first milestone/step.
• It then divides this budget by the total work package budget and multiplies the result by the milestone/step weighting factor.

Subsequent Weights Calculation

• For subsequent milestones/steps, Cobra takes the budget that is spread between the previous and next milestone/step.
• It divides this budget by the total work package budget and multiplies the result by the milestone/step-weighting factor.

Handling Same Finish Dates

• 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.