About Initiative milestones
When creating an Initiative, users can set milestones to track the life cycle of the Initiative. Milestones provide a way to ensure that the Initiative project gets launched on time, that work gets done according to schedule, and that Initiatives are completed on time. Milestones are tracked monthly.
Unlike Perspectives and Objectives, Initiatives do not have begin and end dates; instead, an Initiative’s life cycle begins at creation and ends when all of its milestones are complete and the Initiative no longer needs to collect measure data. However, since an Initiative supports an Objective, the Initiative’s milestone time frames need to fall within the associated Objective’s Period Begin and Period End dates. To ensure this happens, each newly-created Initiative comes with two built-in milestones:
- Initiative Kickoff – Uses the current date as the milestone’s start date.
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Initiative Completion – Uses the last day of the month of the Period End date of the associated Objective as the milestone’s start and end dates. For example, if the Objective Period End date is June 2021, the Initiative Completion milestone dates will be June 30, 2021.
NOTE: The system only displays Objective dates on the Admin Maintenance page to system administrators.
Before submitting the Initiative for approval, if you delete both of these Initiatives without adding any others, save the file and then go back to the plan file page, the default Initiatives will be restored. (However, if the milestones are deleted during the owner or sponsor review stages, the Initiatives are not restored.) This is a safeguard to prevent creating Initiatives with no milestones. While you can save an Initiative without milestones, the best practice recommendation is to have at least one Milestone per Initiative. This is especially important because Initiative status is derived from milestone status. You do not have to add all the milestones before submitting the Initiative for approval; the Initiative owner The user responsible for ensuring that the Initiative is executed and that its measure data and milestone statuses are updated according to schedule. The Initiative owner is also responsible for reviewing the Initiative during the creation approval process. or sponsor The user who authorizes Initiatives, including those that are proposed by someone else and those that they propose. The Initiative sponsor does not create Initiatives but instead provides authority for work to be done on Initiatives. The sponsor also reviews and approves Initiatives during various stages in Initiative approval processes. can add milestones before the Initiative is approved to active tracking The Initiative approval process stage in which Initiative owners and system admins can update Initiative measure data and milestone status..
After the Initiative has been approved to the Active Tracking stage, Initiative owners and sponsors can update the status of milestones.
When the system displays an overall Status for an Initiative on the Initiatives page, it uses the most recent status of the Initiative’s milestones. However, the milestone status displayed in the Status column on the Initiatives page is not an aggregation of the Initiative’s milestones; rather, the system checks the status of all the Initiative’s milestones and if there is a problem with any of them, the system displays the status that is the most urgent.
For example, if any milestones have the status of Needs Attention, then this is the status that displays in the Status column, even if the other milestones are On Track or Completed. However, if another one of the Initiative’s milestones has the status At Risk, then this is the status that displays because At Risk is a higher level of urgency than Needs Attention. This feature allows you to see immediately which Initiatives need help to get back on track.
Milestone status icons
Initiative milestone status is represented using KPI icons but no trend icons. When the dash icon (
) is used to represent milestone status, it indicates that there is no milestone data. No milestone data usually indicates that the Initiative has not reached the Active Tracking stage in the
