Before you report
Milestone Trend Analyzer
See which milestone dates keep moving, which are speeding up, and which will never arrive at their current rate of slip, from the forecasts you have already reported.
Read a .xlsx or .csv of milestone forecasts, or several saved versions of a Project or Primavera schedule, inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Milestone forecasts
Drop a spreadsheet here
A column per report headed by its date, or a report date and forecast on each row. An Actual column for milestones achieved.
The chart that shows what each report hides
Every status report states a date for each milestone, and each one sounds reasonable on its own. The milestone trend chart puts them all together: the date of each report along the bottom, the forecast it gave up the side. A milestone that keeps its date draws a flat line. One that slips climbs. And one that slips a day for every day that passes climbs at forty-five degrees, parallel to the diagonal where the forecast would equal today. At that rate it is never reached, however confident each report sounds.
Four things it measures for each milestone
How far it has slipped since the first forecast, in weekdays. How many times it moved, and in which directions: a date that moves both ways is not being managed, just re-guessed. How fast it is moving now, in forecast days per day of reporting. And whether that pace has sped up, which is how a late project announces itself before anyone says the word.
How good were the forecasts?
For milestones already achieved, the tool compares every forecast made before the date with the date itself. The average gap says whether this project’s forecasts run optimistic, and by how much; the report from which they were consistently right says how far ahead the truth was known. Both are worth knowing the next time a date is promised.
Where the forecasts come from
Most teams keep milestone forecasts in a spreadsheet: one row per milestone and a column per report, or one row per milestone per report. Either layout is read, with an Actual column if there is one. Or add the saved versions of a schedule, each Project XML or XER file with its status date, and the milestones are read and scheduled from each.
What this does not do
It cannot say why a date moved; the Schedule Version Comparator does that for two versions of a schedule. It counts weekdays without holidays, because the reports carry no calendar. And a trend is a pattern in past reports, not a forecast of its own: a milestone receding as fast as time passes today can be recovered tomorrow, which is the reason to see it early.