Task Milestones and the FP Production Report

Everybody likes reaching milestones. They’re small accomplishments achieved on the way to the completion of a larger goal and provide us with a small hit of dopamine and the motivation to keep going. Well, Function Point allows your creative teams to work towards milestones, allowing project managers to get a higher level idea as to how work is progressing through each stage or department. Milestones can be added to a Task from its own Task page, or from the Schedule view. Adding and using Milestones is completely optional.

The Production Report gives you the ability to see all your Jobs based on their specific milestones that lead up to your final due date and completion of each job. It can be used as the start of your weekly production meetings, or as a way to regularly check-in on all of the work milestone due dates.

In this article, you’ll learn how-to set up milestones of your own and apply them to Tasks. You will also learn how and where to access the Production Report.

Setting up Milestones

Your FP system will come with a couple of preset Milestones, so you’ll want to add your own. From the Admin menu, choose System Set Up > List Maintenance.

From the Select a List list, choose Milestone. This will populate the Edit List Items portion of the page.

Use the controllers here to create new Milestones, or edit any already there. Drag and drop Milestones into your preferred order, or have the system order them alphabetically. Be sure to save any changes when done.

Add a Milestone to a Task

When creating or editing a Task, select the Milestone you’d like to associate from the drop-down menu. Click Submit to save your change.

Add Milestones to the Schedule

When creating or editing a schedule, Milestones have their own column and can be added in-line or edited in the schedule view. Click Save Changes as you go.

Sort Tasks by Milestone on the Dashboard

In the Tasks/ To Dos tile on your Dashboard, as well as on the full screen view, you have the option to filter the content you see. Common filter choices are to see those Tasks that are “Assigned to Me” and “Open (Assigned/ In Progress)”.

Should you need to see and sort Tasks by virtue of their Milestone, that option is available in the second filter menu. Selecting different filters will immediately change what you see on screen.

Find Tasks by Milestone

From the Tasks module, you can look for Tasks by virtue of their Milestone. From the Milestone field, you can select one or more of your set Milestones. Click Find Tasks when ready.

On the resulting list view, you can choose what column content to show, and in what order via Manage Columns.
Click any column header to sort by that value, and use the PDF or CSV options to print up or push your data to a spreadsheet as needed.

Accessing the Production Report

The Production Report is available through the Job Find’s list view. To begin, hover over Jobs in the main navigation bar and choose Find Job.

On the resulting Job Find page, you can search in a couple of ways:

1. Leave all the fields empty and simply click Find Active. This will produce a list of Jobs, all of which are in an active state (Open, Completed).
2. Enter any variety of parameters into the available fields. Then click Find Jobs. This will produce a list of Jobs that match your search criteria.

For this example, as I’ve inputted a Job Number, and part of a Company Name, I’ll then click Find Jobs to get my resulting list that match that criteria.

I can now see the one Job listed, and can access the report. Job level reports can be found under the report icon in the top right. From here, select Production Report.

The Production Report outputs as XML and is best opened using Excel.

In my example, the one Job is showing. And for each Milestone column, the date is the latest one of any Tasks associated to that Milestone. Each milestone in the system will become a column, and milestone dates that have been set will show next to the job in the column. If you have jobs without milestones (as in the example above) the columns will show blank next to that job.

Pull this report as often as you need, using different criteria as you see fit.