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Milestone and Constraints

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Brian Walkin
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I'm wondering wha the best practice it for this issue. Here is a simple example

Complete Roof (Agreed owner milestone) 1 March 2022. Constraint is "Finish On or Before".

It's predesessor activity is Install Roof and Flashing.  If this activity is showing a week early completion then the milestone also shows early completion; this gets confusing as the milestones are important commercial turnovers and we don't want them to change everytime we update the schedule. Now if the predecessor is going to finish on 10 March 22, then I can can see 10 days neg total float which tells me its critical and going to be late.  I like this information.

However if i use Finish On. It just finishes regardless of its predecessors and shows Total Float as 0.

If I use "Finish On or After" then it finishes either on or later but the total float is calculated to the project "Must Finish By" date.

 

A cumbersome solution is to write the miletstone date in the activity name and use "Finish On or Before"

 

Anyway I hope that the question is clear. Please let me know what options i have for something like this.

Replies

Zoltan Palffy
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it should be finish on or before. You can easlity track the float and it is a good idea to put that in the activity description ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Anything eles you are just fooling yourself. 

Also put the must finish by date in the description 

Rafael Davila
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Rodel Marasigan
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Hi Brian,

My recommendation is to use the soft constraint “Finish on Or Before” or “Finish on Or After" so it will not distort the CP and show the correct float on the schedule then used the baseline for Milestone analysis. You could set a status column using a Variance Column and UDF indicator (traffic light).

Brian Walkin
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Joined: 27 Dec 2017
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Answering my own question with another possibility. The milestone is repeated, once in it's work WBS and once in the Milestone section. In Milestones it is "Finish On" and in the work WBS the related activity milstone, without constraint will show the Total Float. This works but I have to create and apply a filter to bring all of the Milestones together.

 

Any other options?