Tracking milestones across the enterprise

[dave]

I have a project plan published that has a bunch of
milestones in it. I want to insert one of those milestones
in several different projects and watch it move when the
orginal moves.

I tried to insert the milestone plan into a project, but I
don't want to see the whole thing. If I then delete out
the milestones I am not interested in, it deletes them in
the main file as well.

So I tried making a milestone in my project and
typing "<>\master_milestones.published\3" in the
predasessor field. That links the milestone to the
milestone in the main file and I see the grey diamond
ghost task.

That seems to work ok, but when the milestones change I
get strange behavior that I don't fully understand. Also,
I would prefer not to make a dependancy relationship.
Also, its kind of a hassel for the users to type that in.

Another scenario: I want to track 3 milestones from each
project in the porfolio. I want to insert the tasks in a
plan. Again, as above, I can type in the predasessor
field, but for the same reasons as above, doesn't seem to
be the best solutiun.

Is there an elegant way to track tasks from other plans?

Thanks in advance for any help.....dave

[joe raiti]

In my opinion, the best solution for your milestone
schedules is to link each milestone you are interested in
watching move, to predecessor tasks in other projects
using external linking as you mentioned below. Once
baselined you can compare the movements to the "original"
plan. I'm interested in hearing you describe the strange
behavior you have seen. I've only ever seen the
application provide the choices to accept any impacting
change or to break the link.

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[Dave]

I found another technique: use paste special to copy the
date from milestone to another. That turns out to work a
little differently.

When I made all those links using the pred fields, I got a
ton of grey ghost tasks in the master milestone plan,
where I did not really want to see them.

The strange behavior was not really that strange and
excatly what you describe. Just a dialog box asking for
confirmation.

Thanks for advice.

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