To get you started, here is a walk through of the main features of Milestone Planner, from when you sign in, to when you finish a project.

Open a project

Projects are the main spaces in Milestone Planner and most of the action is focused on them. Each project has a team, which can be listed by clicking “people”. That team might be just you, but there is no reason to work alone! Invite as many people as you need to and share your project plan with them.

Clicking on “My Projects” gives you an overview of the projects you are working on, and a detailed status of each one. It is also the place where you can create new projects and delete old ones.

Set your Milestones

Rather than make a project a to do list that doesn’t get done, we look at it as a series to things to be achieved on the way to completion: Milestones. Milestones mark the places you go past on your way to successfully completing the project.

Personally, I like to work backwards when I build a project plan – clicking on the striped timeline to create a final milestone at the end of the project, then adding milestones to the left of that, marking the things that lead up to it. You can add milestones in any order you like, systematically or just as you think of them. Just ensure that they are clear and achievable. The vertical red bar indicates today’s date.

Organise with Workstreams

A big project sometimes has hundreds of milestones, so grouping them together helps organise things more neatly. Even with a small project it can make sense to group milestones together – perhaps by the team that is responsible for them, or the place where they are happening. In Milestone Planner these groupings are called Workstreams and are shown as horizontal boxes. You can create as many or as few as you need, and even add a little descriptive overview for each one if you would like.

See Things Getting Done

You can mark each Milestone complete (which turns it blue) as it is achieved – or assign an owner to a milestone, invite them to the project, and they can mark it done for you. No need for emails or voicemail tennis. You can add notes to any Milestone, and in the pro version you can see a full history of all the changes since the milestone was created.

If you are going to be a little late with a milestone you can click and drag it along the time-line to it’s new target date – or perhaps delight everyone by being a little ahead of time and dragging it to the left to an earlier date.

People don’t always see the world in blue and green, so you can also switch a milestone to amber/yellow, orange or red by clicking on it. We leave it up to you and your team to choose what each means to you, but Blue always means done/complete and milestones start their lives as green triangles.

Know Exactly How Your Projects Are Doing

When you come back to a project, you will see any updated milestones highlighted with a gold star. If you want to know more about a change, just click on the milestone to see the recent changes. You can zoom in and out to choose how many weeks of the timeline you see at once, or scroll along the timeline to inspect longer projects. If things are still looking a bit cluttered, it can help to hide the milestone details for a while, using the detail toggle.

We really hope that you enjoy using Milestone Planner and are always open to hearing ways to make it a more satisfying experience. Login, or leave us a comment here, and you can send feedback at anytime from within the application itself.

Happy planning!

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People have been asking about how to add other people to a project in Milestone Planner, so here is a quick walkthough. Head over to Milestone Planner and login (if you don’t have a login, then do sign up for a trial account now).

Select a project, so you are in the main Milestone Planner time-line view:

Click on any milestone, or create a new one by clicking in a workstream – I’m going to add a new milestone in the blog posts work stream, so I’ll click there. The milestone is about this post and I’m going to assign Dave as the owner. As I type Dave’s name in the owner box, an ‘invite’ button appears:

Clicking on the invite button gives two ways to invite Dave – either with Standard Access, or with Super Access.

With “Standard Access” Dave can move and update only milestones assigned to him. “Super Access” gives Dave full access to the project, just like a project owner, including the ability to create new work streams and to invite more people to the project. I just need to enter Dave’s email address, click the invite  button and he will be emailed an invite, complete with a URL to click on.

Inviting someone without a milestone

For now, the easiest way to do this is to click on any milestone, then type the name of the person you wish to invite. Press the invite button, enter their email address and then press ‘invite’ to send the message. Now change the owner name back. This will send the new person an invite and leave the milestone untouched.

When the new user joins the project, they will be able to see the full milestone plan, but will not be able to change anything until a milestone or work stream is assigned to them – the milestones will have locks by them to indicate this:

If you have been using Milestone Planner for a while and already have lots of milestones, just click on any milestone and you will see the invite box if you have an owner name there, or if you would like to do everyone in a batch, click the people button and you will get a list of everyone on the project, and the ability to invite them.

To remove someone from a project, simply re-assign the milestones they owned (we wouldn’t want any milestones without owners!). Now click on the “people” button, find them on the list and click “remove access”. There, all done.

There are lots of other pieces of useful information in the people list, for example you can see how many workstreams and milestones each person has, and when they last updated the plan.

Do let us know how you get on, or if you have any questions!

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