Milestone Work Field Locked

Hi Stacey,

A milestone is a task of zero "work" that shows an important achievement in a project. Milestones are a way of knowing how the project is advancing if you are not familiar with the tasks being executed. They have zero "work" because they symbolize an achievement, a point of time in a project. You can actually report time and actual effort on the milestone but since it symbolizes an event, you cannot define "work" for a milestone. Therefore, the work field will be locked for the milestone. Let me know if this helps.

Yet the Milestone inherits the "work" of its children tasks, so it is almost never of 0h duration unless it is a standalone milestone. It is counterintuitive and my chief gripe about Clarizen. Is there a work around for this other than not having milestones in your Clarizen project plan?

The way to think about a Clarizen milestone is that it contains all of the tasks required to achieve that milestone. You can use stand-alone milestones as well, but the best practice is to group task work into milestones.  If a standalone item has "work" associated with it then it should be a task.

Our company is in the same boat.  Our projects contain 4 primary work types that are milestones.  Setup, Execution, Research, Reporting.  We do not need to drill down (for most projects) specific tasks needed to carry out the work.  Each milestone should be completed within a set number of hours - but we have no way of actually assigning work effort to it, although each projects work allowance for each type can be drastically different.  We could create 4 tasks instead of milestones, but for the 20% of projects we need to actually create specific tasks under each work type would require additional manual work, converting the 4 primary tasks to milestones, and then adding the tasks underneath - HOWEVER a majority of the time, the primary 4 tasks would have already had time reported against them, and upon conversion - the time is lost.  We could also perform this by creating sub tasks under the 4 primaries, but again, as soon as you do that, it becomes a roll up.  What would be the best way to tackle this situation?