Simply put, a milestone is a collection of tasks inside of a project. The milestone feature makes it easy to break down larger projects with a lot of tasks into smaller deliverables. For example, a milestone could be a project phase, or an Agile sprint. They are flexible and have an unlimited number of practical applications.
We recently had a customer ask if a milestone could be copied to another project. Unfortunately, the answer is no. But there are ways around this limitation.
Why can’t milestones be copied to another project? The reason is that tasks in Intervals often contain several dependencies that are unique to that project. For example, the task may have time entered on it by a person who doesn’t have access to other projects. Or, the same task time entry could be using a work type that’s available only on that project.
Copying a milestone to another project would require checking and resolving all of the dependencies in each task. This would result in an overly complex and confusing user experience. Instead, we recommend utilizing one of two workarounds:
Copy the entire project
Copying the entire project will get you around the dependency issue because it makes an exact copy of every project asset, including work types, modules, and project team. Once you’ve copied the project, remove the milestones that you don’t need. This approach is most useful when your goal is to copy multiple milestones.
Copy individual tasks
Copying an individual task won’t get you around the dependency issue, but Intervals will prevent you from copying a task from one project to another. And, it will explain which dependencies need to be resolved, if any, before the task can be copied. Once you’ve copied all of the tasks needed, create a new milestone for those tasks. Copying individual tasks can be more tedious, so it’s better to use this workaround for copying smaller milestones.