Milestone Planner

Milestones represent key achievements in your plan. The name describes the event, for example "Flowers sent to customer" or "Beta testing completed". Milestones have an owner, the person responsible for achieving the milestone, and a target date, which represents when the owner believes the milestone will have been reached. Clicking on a milestone allows you to change its status - represented as green, yellow, orange or red. When a milestone is achieved, it is marked as blue - done! Clicking and dragging a milestone enables you to change its date and move it between workstreams.

Workstreams are a useful way to group together milestones. In a plan with lots of milestones, it is helpful to spread them across workstreams to keep things easy to understand. Workstreams might represent areas of work, objectives, sub-teams or anything that you find helpful. Workstreams can also have an owner. This provides a way to delegate responsibility for areas of a project, especially where team members only have 'view' access to a plan. Workstreams can have descriptions, to explain their purpose.

Milestones and Workstream owners can simply be names, but when you invite those people to your plan, Milestone Planner becomes really powerful. Clicking on the name by a Milestone or Workstream lets you set the owner. By default you own any milestones or workstreams that you create. Type the name of the person you would like to assign to. You can either click the tick (OK), or click the invite button to pull up the invitation form. Enter the person's name and email address. You can customise the message if you would like. Once you click 'invite', we'll take care of the rest. They will receive a simple email inviting them to Milestone Planner.

Plans are an effective way to record your intentions, but plans change. Milestone Planner makes it quick and easy to update your plans, but it also lets you track those changes, so that everyone knows what is happening. The Activity Stream, on the left hand side of the screen, shows any changes, in the style of a micro-blog, with the most recent changes at the top. Clicking on a milestone or workstream name, or the picture of a person, focusses the activity stream on that user. Clicking the "more" button fetches more of the plan's history.

There are a number of ways of viewing your plans. The main view is the timeline, which shows milestones arranged by date. The dashboard gives you a quick overview of your milestones, showing what has been completed in the last few days, what is due today, and what is upcoming in the next week. The milestones view gives an agenda style "list" view, with the milestones in date order. The plans view shows the overall progress and status of each plan, and who is involved in it.

Wherever you see an RRS or a calendar icon, you can click to receive a feed of that information. RSS feeds are available for plans, and for milestones you specifically own. The feeds are secured by encryption and a password, just like your Milestone Planner account. For most web browsers and operating systems you can simply click on the icons and follow the prompts. It is best to set your machine to remember the login details, to avoid problems with some operating systems. Similarly with calendar feeds. If you have the option to, we suggest setting this to update every few hours, or at least once a day.

The most succesful plans are ones that are viewed and reviewed frequenty. Keep signing in to MilestonePlanner.com and refreshing your plans. Milestones should be as clear and specific as you can make them, and plans that are shared with multiple people always seem to stay on track more that when you go solo!