Best usage of milestones in a Gantt?

Question

**Background**I'm building a project Gantt, involving multiple teams. In the past I've had a good experience with a Gantt as a means of planning a project but not so much as a means of tracking a project's progress.I'm trying to figure out what would be the best way to reflect the integration points and dependencies between teams and then track it as easily as possible.**Current approach**Right now, what I have in mind is creating tasks for teams' activities and after each task that indicates a delivery to another team I creating a milestone, with the task as its predecessor. The receiving team's task depends on the milestone.Example: ==== [Team A develops] +-> * [Team A development complete] +-> ==== [Team B develops]The downside of this approach is that the Gantt gets cluttered with a lot of milestones. The upside is that I get more control down the road around team delivery tracking and an easier way to filter the deliveries of each of the teams. Also, a side benefit is to avoid messing with weird task updates, splits, etc. I would ask for updates to estimated delivery dates.I'd be happy to hear your thoughts and ideas around this issue. How would you approach this?

Answer 1

I recommend that you minimize the number of milestones. Milestones should be reserved for major events or deadlines to keep the team focussed on what's ahead and drive a sense of urgency. Too many and you their importance fades along with the sense of urgency.

As for the "Spaghetti mess" created when you constantly link up and down - I recommend you organize the deliverables to avoid this as much as possible. Too many links up and down just confuses everyone - including the people who created the schedule. I spend some time creating a Deliverable Work Breakdown Structure (DWBS) on a single sheet before laying out the schedule - I find it easier to design a plan that avoids the mess when I can see the whole picture in front of me.