In this article, you understand the uses of milestone trend analysis basics to advance guide. We will give you some charts and template for helping you during drafting your project documentation and forecasting analysis. Excel-based template can also use in WORD and PDF format documents. Useful charts base template for project activity & documentation planning.

Milestone planning is a integral part of project planning, so review these template for more detail.

Just like Project critical path technique, project managers are suing this analysis in forecasting projects.

Key Features of Milestone Trend Analysis Excel

In project management, Milestones are set to describe a certain event or point in a project schedule.

It conveys important information such as key achievement, a reminder of documentation or meeting, or alert for conducting the analysis. Milestones are points over the project timeline which don’t consume any time or resource. Milestones summarize all tasks after which it is set.

  1. Templates can be attached with Project planning process
  2. MS excel-Word based format
  3. Helpful in the project scheduling process
  4. Eye-catching images or template for your project document
  5. Change project policy after this chart

One can just have a look at milestones instead of all tasks to see a big picture of key project tasks and how they are set to achieve. Milestones are aimed during the project planning phase and mapped on the project timeline during the project scheduling process.

Milestone Trend Analysis Excel

Milestone trend analysis is a graphical tool that helps to keep track of milestones achievement over the project lifecycle. It is important for the project manager to aware of milestone slippage, visualize its impact over the project timeline and follow the evolution of the project milestone dates throughout the project lifecycle.

How does Milestone Trend Analysis Template work?

Milestone trend analysis is a milestone monitoring or tracking tool that helps to analyze the milestones evolution using a simple graphical chart.

MTA (Milestone Trend Analysis) graph has two axes; both axes are the time axis. The vertical time axis represents the planned dates of milestone achievement with respect to the reporting dates written along the horizontal time axis. Each milestone is represented by a different pattern or colour trend line over the MTA chart.

It is really easy to understand and read the milestone trend chart. Along the vertical time axis, the planned date of milestone achievement is monitored against the horizontal time axis reporting date.

There is a 45° diagonal line on the chart that represents the deadline of each milestone relevant to the project completion date. Any delay in the milestone achievement will directly impact the project completion. When a milestone reaches this line, it shows the achievement of a milestone. Milestone achievement over the diagonal line is monitored against dates on both the time axis to see if there is any difference in planned and actual reporting date.

There can be 3 possible scenarios;

  1. The planned date and reporting date is the same; it represents that the milestone is achieved as per plan.
  2. The reporting date is earlier than the planned date; it represents that the milestone is achieved earlier than the plan.
  3. The reporting date is later than the planned date; it represents that the milestone is achieved later than the plan.
  4. A requirement management plan is also a part of this analysis

Trends of Milestone Chart Excel(Format):

There can be many possible ways to represent different trends of milestones during project lifecycle over Milestone Trend Analysis chart such as;

  1. Normal Line: When activities lie under a milestone are completed on time with minor deviations. The milestone progress over the MTA chart looks like a horizontal line.
  2. Rising Line: When activities lie under a milestone get delayed, it will delay the achievement of milestone which will show a trend of rising line over MTA chart.
  3. Falling Line: When activities lie under a milestone are achieved well before the planned time. It will look like a falling line on the MTA chart representing the earlier achievement of a milestone than planned.
  4. Zigzag Line: When a milestone chart shows a zigzag trend line, it means the plan is not reliable and any forecast about milestone achievement will not be accurate.

These charts have usually been used in construction, Networking, and bigger projects. We have available PPT slides for Free. You can request ProjectsManagement.NET team for uploading those files.

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