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Milestones Professional by Kidasa Software, Inc.
by Reviewed by Steve Carmeli, NOCCC , isa714sc@cs.com - June 18, 2001 at 20:47:32:
Milestones Professional is a project management package. Its claims to fame are its abundant graphical formatting features, interoperability with other Windows programs using OLE automation and master- and sub-scheduling. I’m used to Symantec OnTarget and Microsoft Project, albeit lightly, so I’ll be comparing Milestones Professional to these.General Features—Milestones Professional has most of the features of a project management software package:
• Tasks need not be displayed in lock-step fashion with one task following another. It is possible to position tasks so that several are coordinated. For example, you may want three tasks to end on the same date. You could do this by simply drawing a task and then dragging its end date to end with another task and dragging its start maker to indicate a start date.
• You can have multiple occurrences of a task occur. OnTarget can’t do this.
• You can publish your project chart to the Internet or email it. If you publish as a hypertext file, hyperlinks can be embedded in the browsed file that link to other projects. Another unique feature.
• A viewer is included that you can freely distribute so colleagues can view or print, but not edit, your projects without having to own a copy of Milestones Professional. As above, project files can be located anywhere.
• You can define a master schedule that is made up of sub-schedules. This would be useful for a manager with subordin-ates who are also using Milestones Professional. Sub-schedules can be placed on your own computer, of course; your server; or another computer in a network. This PC would be a node or server. For this feature you just specify the location of the computer in Universal Naming Convention (Computer name, directory, file). Finally, a master schedule can have links to sub-schedules via an Intranet or the Internet. The advantage? When the master schedule is loaded, it can update itself from the remote sub-schedules. Also a unique feature.
• In some project managers, it is possible to have a symbol indicate the start of a task and a different symbol indicate the end of a task, with a bar in between the symbols. Milestones Professional has a whopping 96 different possible symbols you can use.
• You can embed an invisible symbol and attach notes and actions to it. An example of an action would be to start your email program when the date matching the date attached to the invisible symbol occurs.
• One of its innovative features is OLE Automation. With it, a programmer can write code in Visual Basic that would control Milestones Professional. It could, for example, read the task descriptions, start dates and durations from a database and enter those tasks in Milestones Professional.
• You can manually adjust the height of a row, but not all selected rows at once.
• Holidays can be made to appear on the timeline as a vertical bar of user-defined color but it is still possible to schedule an event to appear on that date. If you do, though, the duration will indicate 0 days instead of 1.
• The number of possibilities for customizing a chart are virtually endless. You can choose the color and shape of begin and end markers, their vertical and horizontal date and text placement and shadow color and size, date background, text background. Any taskbar can have one of six gradient fills.
• A nice feature is called “SmartColumns.” These are columns that add a function to a column. Examples are Start Date, End Date and WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) columns. This last column numbers each task in a particular manner. A summary bar would be labeled 1.0 or 2.0 while a subtask would be numbered 1.1 or 2.1. All numbering is automatic once you define the column as a SmartColumn.
• An included add-on is a PERT chart-maker. This type of chart puts all the steps of a task in horizontal sequence with name, start date and end date included in a box.
But it seems to me that Kidasa was so bent on filling Milestones Professional with bells and whistles that they overlooked basic usability features. Their conclusion: OLE automation, master- and sub-scheduling and an abundance of formatting features. The problem is they didn’t bother to include features common to winning project managers. Some examples:
• The number of entries per page is a user-defined option within the model wizard. This is a bad use of space. On one hand, a task description can consume more than one line; on the other hand if it doesn’t, you just have a lot of unused space on the page. It didn’t seem possible to have more than ten tasks on a page. But, each task can have dates and text vertically above, centered, or below it and horizontally to the left, right or centered on it. Task bars can be filled with gradients. Why? All these formatting features make your chart look like a Christmas tree.
• You can’t just enter a system description and duration and have it calculate it dates, including skipping over weekends and holidays. You can enter a start date and duration and it will calculate end date. If you set it to show days, it won’t show weeks, rather the weeks in days. In other words, you can’t mix time denominators.
• It seems pointless to me to enter start and end dates for tasks. If you already know these, what purpose does it make to manually draw them on a form? To make pretty charts? Sounds like a lot of work to me.
• The examples in the manual are often out of focus and hard or impossible to read.
• The toolbar has 16 different duration graphics displayed at all times. Since you’ll probably only have one graphic for the whole model, the other fifteen are a waste of screen space. The toolbox can be customized to remove these extraneous markers. And finally, there are two toolboxes: Standard and Combo. The combo groups the start- task marker, task duration bar and end-task marker.
• You can paste graphics in the schedule area. Is this really necessary in a project manager?
• You can’t assign resources and cost to an event. For example, suppose a small construction company wants to lay down cement in several locations, there’s no way in Milestones Professional to assign a cement mixer and its cost to a task.
• Many items on the worksheet can have an abundance of formatting features, but do these make sense? For example, the tutorial has one assign a free-form text entry with a light blue shadow with a border. Is this a draw program or a project manager? My thinking is that the creators of Milestones Professional would’ve been better off building real functionality into the product rather than all these effects.
• It only has a single step undo, not infinite undo. · The chart title, which can be up to three lines high and be formatted extensively, appears on every page on-screen, taking up more space than is necessary. For example, in Symantec OnTarget, I enter a task description and duration, I don’t worry about start and end dates or not starting or ending on weekends or holidays and where one task ends and another begins. After I’ve entered all my tasks, I select all tasks, type Ctl-C and all the tasks are scheduled for me. I enter costs at the lowest level and costs are accumulated automatically.
Unique Features—Milestones Professionals has a feature called ValueSets. A ValueSet is a list of values entered into a dialog box. The reason for this is so you can assign the entire set of values to an object called a Datagraph. A Datagraph is a graph that is placed on the bottom of the schedule. In some cases, ValueSets can be distributed over the timeline of a task proportionately. There are five types of ValueSets:
1. Keyed in global values: you define one set of values for the entire schedule;
2. Sum of values keyed into task lines: values are entered by time period for each task;
3. Allocate column values across timeline: values are entered into a column and Milestones Professional spreads them across each task’s time span;
4. Use values from symbols: use values that you enter for each symbol;
5. Total of other ValueSets: an easy way to display the total of other ValueSets.
• Milestones Professional can automatically number any task or subtask in the Work Breakdown Structure numbering scheme. WBS Numbering is used in conjunction with outlining. In outlining you indent steps to indicate which steps belong to which task.
• You can have up to five dependencies above and five below. This means that tasks vertically preceding a task and those vertically following a task cannot begin until a particular task begins. These tasks are dependent on one task. As the manual says: With dependency mode turned on, when the end point for a bar is moved, all the other dependent bars will move by the same amount of time.
• You can import Microsoft Project files. I suppose that you import the file and then use Milestones Professional to enhance the timeline graphically. But I wonder about features Microsoft Project has that Milestones Professional doesn’t, like assigning people to tasks.
I was quite disappointed because I couldn’t input times worked on a task and have Milestones Professional calculate percent complete and costs to date, including time and cost overrun. Costs had to be externally calculated and then entered into a ValueSet.
If you’re used to conventional project charts, where one bar begins where a previous bar ends, you’ll have some difficulty adjusting to what Milestones Professional can do. Space considerations prohibit me from publishing a chart, but they can be complex. All the customization features help map out sections of a chart so you can focus on groupings such as sequences and summaries.
Do I recommend Milestones Professional? Well, it really depends on your needs. If you’re an administrative assistant charged with making a pretty timeline and have the time and patience to enter a pre-existing timeline from Microsoft Project, then I can whole-heartedly recommend the product. But if you’re a project manager who wants to just enter dates, personnel and resources, and then enter tasks and have the start and end sequence coordinated by the program, then I think Milestones Professional is a cumbersome product. I found it hard to get used to, and its ValueSets counter-intuitive. This is not a carte blanche approval of Microsoft Project; I’ve used Microsoft Project to develop a software project timeline and found it to be cumbersome too. But the abundance of controls, dialog boxes and graphic features make me wonder why anyone would bother to make a project so graphically rich; it seems that all the visual data would make comprehending the data that much more difficult.
In summary, Milestones Professional is a project manager whose strengths are extensive formatting capabilities, OLE automation programming and nested scheduling. If those features appeal to you, then check it out.
Retail price: $229.00 Tech support free and unlimited but not toll free
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