Status of my milestones
Having an overall sense of where your milestones (or initiatives, actions, or activities) are can help you identify where to focus your efforts. What needs to be moved to the next stage? What do you need to flag for leadership attention?
Follow these steps to create a visualization that allows you to see all your milestones with the most recent end date first and colored by planning summary, as illustrated in the image below. You can also create a version of this visualization that shows initiative status.
How to use
- Pull this report weekly to review and update the status of your work
- Start at the top of the report where you will see the milestones coming due soonest
- Look at initiatives that are red for late, as well as at the initiatives that are orange for due soon
- Double click milestones (or initiatives) to see details
- If you are reviewing initiatives, you can flag those which have some issues or require leadership attention
Step-by-step Instructions
1. Ensure you are in list view. If not, navigate to the upper left corner and click on the visualization type and select List view from the dropdown.
2. Next, click on the filter icon 
in the upper right corner and select Filter by milestone. Set the following filters:
- Milestone owner - Filter for me only
- End date - uncheck Include items without a date
3. Click on the view setting icon 
to the left of the filter icon, then click on the group icon 
.Select Group by milestone, then End date.
Next, click on the sorting icon 
and Sort by milestone, then select End date. Ensure that the ordering is Descending.
Finally, you may wish to click on the color icon and select Planning summary to see at a glance which initiatives are on track or which require attention.
Visualization Option
Create this visualization at the initiative level with these modifications:
In Step 2, Filter by initiative as follows:
- Initiative Owner - Filter for me only
In Step 3, Group by L4 latest estimated date and Sort by L4 latest estimated date.
One best practice is to view and update this data weekly. You will want to save your workbook view for future reference.