Milestone Gantt - Overview

The Milestone Gantt is a visual, colour-coded timeline that plots project milestones against a horizontal date axis, showing at a glance which milestones are overdue, which are on track, and which are still to begin. It is one of the most important schedule-awareness tools in Cora PPM, bridging the gap between the raw task schedule (the Core Gantt) and high-level status reporting.

What it shows

Each project occupies a row. Within that row, small triangular markers (milestone symbols) are placed precisely along the timeline at their due dates. Every marker is colour-coded by status:

A red dashed vertical line marks today's date on the timeline so users can immediately judge which milestones have slipped past the present moment.

What milestones it tracks

The Gantt supports several distinct milestone categories, each configurable through the Settings panel:

• Tier-level milestones (Tier 2, Tier 3, etc.) – defined via Milestone Deliverable types (e.g. Billing Milestone, Submission Milestone). These are standard schedule tasks that have been flagged as milestones.

• Key Milestones – tasks explicitly marked as Key in the milestone record; can be filtered separately.

• At-Risk Milestones – tasks marked as being at risk; shown as a distinct filter category.

• Key Activities – a parallel tracked item type aligned to specific task fields (e.g. a percentage-complete event, a start date event), displayed as a different marker style (labelled "KA") alongside regular milestones.

Baseline comparison

Users can overlay a baseline on top of the current schedule to visualise schedule drift. Baseline options include:

• None (default)

• First Approved baseline

• Latest Approved baseline

• All baselines, System baselines, or User-created baselines (project view)

A separate "ghost" bar and a small diamond marker appear for each milestone's original baseline finish date, making slippage immediately visible without any manual calculation.

Project phases / Gantt bars

Optionally, the horizontal bar for each project row is colour-coded by phase (e.g. Engineering, Procurement, Construction in an EPC project), allowing the viewer to understand not just when milestones fall, but also what phase of the project is driving each one.

Timeline scales and zoom

The timeline can be rendered at four scales – Monthly, Quarterly, Half-Yearly, or Yearly – and a zoom level (1 = tightest to Maximum = show all periods) lets users compress or expand the view to trade off detail against breadth.

Tooltips

Hovering over any project name or milestone marker shows a configurable tooltip. Up to 10 fields can be configured per layer:

• Project tooltip: project name, status, type, start/finish dates, duration, and any custom SmartForm field.

• Milestone tooltip: task name, task ID, % complete, start/finish dates, duration, deliverable type, detail note, at-risk/key flags, baseline dates, and any custom task field.

Inline milestone management

Users with appropriate rights can right-click any milestone or project row to access a context menu offering:

• Add a milestone to that project

• Change (edit) an existing milestone's name, date, duration, deliverable type, at-risk/key flags, and detail text

• Delete a milestone

• Add a Successor or Predecessor dependency between this milestone and a task in another project (cross-project linking)

• Go to Gantt – navigate directly to the full Core Gantt for that project

All changes are immediately reflected on the Gantt without a page reload.

Where it appears

The Milestone Gantt appears in two distinct contexts:

1. Inside a single project – via the Schedule tab of the Project Details toolbar. It shows the milestones and sub-project milestones for that project and its programme hierarchy.

2. On the Executive Dashboard – as the "Timeline" tab. Here it shows milestones across the entire portfolio visible to the user, subject to the dashboard's strategy/organisation/project filters. In this context it can also be grouped by Strategy, Organisation, Project Phase, Type, Status, or Programme Structure, and it supports configurable extra columns (SmartForm fields, financial figures, register counts) pinned to the left of the timeline.

Export and fullscreen

A Download button exports the entire rendered Gantt to a PDF file (using Kendo UI's drawing library). A Fullscreen button collapses the surrounding page chrome so the Gantt fills the browser window. Both are accessible from the toolbar icons in the top-right corner of the widget.

Why a customer needs it

• Immediate schedule visibility: instead of reading a task list, a PM can see in seconds which milestones are red (overdue) and which are green (done) for the entire project.

• Portfolio oversight: on the Executive Dashboard, a PMO head or executive sponsor can scan across dozens or hundreds of projects on a single screen, immediately spotting where delivery is at risk.

• Baseline/slippage detection: by enabling the baseline overlay, stakeholders can quantify how far each milestone has slipped from the original plan without opening a separate report.

• Contract management: Billing Milestones and Submission Milestones (as seen in the screenshot for the ORCA Upgrade project) are often contractually significant. The Gantt puts these front-and-centre.

• Cross-project dependencies: the dependency management modal lets users enforce and visualise Finish-to-Start links between milestones across different projects, critical for programme-level scheduling.

Accessing the Milestone Gantt

Within a project:

1. Open any project from the home page or the Executive Dashboard.

2. Click the Schedule tab in the project toolbar (visible in the screenshot between "Project Details" and "Financials").

3. The Milestone Gantt loads automatically; the timeline auto-scrolls to today's date.

On the Executive Dashboard (Portfolio Timeline):

1. Navigate to the Executive Dashboard from the main navigation.

2. Click the Timeline tab.

3. Apply any top-level portfolio filters (Strategy, Organisation, Project Stage, etc.) to narrow the projects displayed.

The Milestone Gantt Settings dialog is a personalised configuration panel that controls exactly what is displayed in the Cora PPM Milestone Gantt view — a cross-project horizontal timeline showing project durations, milestone markers, phases, and baseline comparisons. Each user's settings are saved individually (per-user preferences stored in the MilestoneGantt user-saved selections table), so changes here only affect your own view and persist between sessions.

The dialog is partitioned into five focused tabs: