Contractual Milestones

Hi Sam

The only restraint that has a valid purpose in programming is the Project Start Milestone.

All others affect the critical path and should not be used.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Hi,

If it is a Contractual Milestone, then you must include it because your program of works much reflect the scope and delivery time.

A milestone is a zero duration activity, you will need to put a "Must Finish By" in order to achieve the Contractual requirement. Otherwise, the milestone will move with the critical path depending on the progress.

With kind regards,

Samer

If you put a constraint on an intermediate contractual milestone which is logically linked to the programme, it will adversely affect the calculation of total float, and hence the critical path.
Many clients require this, in my view incorrectly.

My prefered method is to show a forecast date for each critical milestone (which is logically linked), and immediately below this, add an isolated milestone showing the contract date so any forecast slippage vs contract can be easily understood, without affecting the critical path.

Contractual Milestones are to be achieved by the contractor as any other deliverable.

So incase it is not constrained then it will move freely when the progress is updated and if it has no impact on the end date then it will also have float and hence the contractor will not target to achieve this intermediate milestone.

I believe it is a must to have contraints on the intermediate milestones. As these intermediate milestones will convert this into a subproject (literal terms) and the contractor must achieve this date.

Sam,

Do you constraint the date of any other deliverable?

If you do not allow the milestone to move freely, 3 things happen:
1) The schedule will not show when the milestone is forecast to be achieved
2) Any activities down stream of that milestone will not be correctly forecast
3) You will loose the ability to automatically calculate the critical path through the entire project

I do not believe it is true to say a contractor will not target to achieve an intermediate milestone just because it is not constrained to target date.

You also won’t be able to compute drag. I agree with Gary.

Sam,

It is not advisable to put a constraint on intermediate milestone as explained by Gary.

But if you want to show negative variance at project completion date, I don’t see any problem to apply "must finish by" constraint on project completion milestone at project level.

Best regards,

R. Catalan

Thanks a lot guys I agree with you that the intermediate contractual Milestone dates must not have constraints to allow the logic to play freely and give us a good critical path.