Starting March 2nd, Hive will be adjusting how milestone action cards behave. This change will take effect across the entire platform and your project plans may be adjusted if you currently have milestone actions and you do not take action.

Remember, you can identify a milestone by the diamond icon on a gantt chart:

the flag when viewing the action card:

and by showing the Milestone column in table view. Also, any milestone row is highlighted in light yellow in table view.

Tip: To get a complete view of all milestones across all of your projects, we recommend creating a milestone summary view.

As of March 2nd, all milestones will be updated to strictly have a 0 day duration. The current default for milestones is a 1 day duration, although it's also possible you have created a duration greater than 1 for your current milestones if you have selected a start date in addition to a due date. Going forward from March 2nd, milestones will only be 0 days.

As mentioned above, with this change, all existing milestones will automatically update to be duration = 0. Let's break this down into two scenarios: when you have milestones with dependencies and ones without.

Milestones without dependencies - no changes

A standalone milestone, with no dependencies or predecessors will not change its due date. Its due date will remain equal to its current due date, the duration of your milestone will simply be changed to 0. If you had a start date set, this will be removed.

Milestones with dependencies - potential changes

If you have autoscheduling set to On or Strict, and you have a milestone with dependencies or predecessors, deadlines in your timeline will change. Let's look at two scenarios using the below timeline example. As you can see, the milestone "Announce" has a 6 day duration, and when the duration changes to 0, its new due date will be 2/22. What happens next depends on the autoscheduling setting.

Scenario 1: Autoscheduling is Strict

As mentioned above, when the duration of the "Announce" milestone changes to 0, its deadline will be 2/22. Because this timeline has strict auto-scheduling, this date will be updated to schedule "as soon as possible", meaning that it can happen immediately after its predecessor which ends on 2/14. So, the 'Announce" milestone can begin on 2/15, so its due date will be 2/15. When "Announce" updates to February 15th, the action that's dependent on it (" Learn") will shift backwards 6 days so it begins on February 15th. The "Learn" action can begin the same day as the milestone now, because the milestone does not have any duration.

Scenario 2: Autoscheduling is On

When the duration of the "Announce" milestone changes to 0 and its deadline is now 2/22, the following action ("Learn") can now begin the same day, so its Start date will update to 2/22, shifting the action card 1 day earlier.

👉 We recommend that if you do not want your timeline to be shifted or you want to maintain your current durations, you should proactively remove the milestone flag by changing the milestone to an action.

To remove a milestone flag on an action card:

What happens now is the milestone is changed to an action card, maintaining the duration, and deadline (due date, or start & due date). Your plan will not change at all.

You could also change this from Table View as shown below by double-clicking the milestone icon on the row you'd like to change to 'Not milestone':

👉 If a milestone has subactions, we recommend you remove the milestone flag and change the milestone to an action.

👉 Finally, if you are concerned with potential timeline shift, we recommend taking a baseline snapshot of your project prior to March 2nd so you can always refer to previous dates on the plan. See: how to create a baseline snapshot.

We're aligning our gantt layout functionality with industry-standard treatment of milestone actions, where milestones automatically have 0 day durations. This also allows you to have a milestone dependent on an action and it display the same deadline as that action, without having to input a predecessor formula like, "FS-1".

This is the last piece in a series of updates that brings our gantt view in-line with common practices - a big win for our gantt-heavy Project Managers. See also: Select and move multiple actions in gantt, Undo date changes in gantt, and the shift-select and right-click to link multiple actions together in gantt.

🗣️ As always, we're listening for your feedback. Let us know what you think about this change here.

If you have a question about this, please reach out here by starting a new conversation with us in the blue question mark. Thank you!