Monday, July 16, 2018

UniPhi 14 - Linking Issues to Milestones

Projects are not managed by Gantt charts. 

Which is why feature 12 in our countdown is linking issues to milestones.

Instead of using Gantt charts, UniPhi uses the Issues module as the centralized method of collaborating to make real progress on a project. Issues are essentially the "things" that need to be completed within a project. Using issues to share ideas and communicate effectively until the task is complete makes a lot more sense that pouring over an antiquated concept (i.e. a Gantt chart), which will be an accurate and reliable aid for about.... 30 minutes.

A list of issues, on the other hand, is a living breathing view of where you project is at, and what needs to be addressed in order to deliver the expected outcomes.

Now, that's not to say the projects are a free for all, and that they can be approached in a haphazard way, and still succeed. The UniPhi approach is to identify as much as is known regarding a particular project, capture those items as issues, and then collaborate, track and manage each of those items. One of the key elements of managing your issues list is to understand where there are dependencies for particular items to occur within a life-cycle phase, and what milestones have been agreed. Once this information is known and understood, it is immensely powerful to see how delays on one task will impact on another, and the impact that delay will have on your project milestones.

Project Schedule and Lifecycles

Once you have identified your project phases and schedules, your milestones, and issue dependencies, UniPhi will automatically update the rest. By linking issues and tasks to a particular milestone, and sequencing those milestones within a life cycle phase, any delay will be cascaded. This means that a delay on a critical date which has been applied to an issue action, will push out the due date for the actual issue, and the linked milestone will also shift. As the milestone shifts, so too will the projects life-cycle forecast date.


Milestones Dashboard
Milestones Visualisation

The key benefit here is that the project schedule, milestones, issues and actions are all updated in real time by the project team. It is now not up to a Project Manager to hold a scheduled meeting to get feedback from the team on who has completed what. It is also not up to them to then take that information and adjust the dreaded Gantt chart. Nor is it their responsibility to produce an updated status report which details how the project has slipped and which milestones are impacted. The Project Manager now only has to manage the project as all of this information is now available and updated live, saving administration time and effort.

Find out what's next on our list of new features by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter!

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