Milestones and Job Lifecycles

This article provides an overview of milestones and their role in the SolarNexus job life cycles.

For details on managing project status using milestones, see Managing Job Status with Milestones.

For details on creating and editing milestones in your account, see Administration - Job Process Milestones.

About Milestones

To complete a project, you must complete many tasks. Milestones are the tasks that mark a major progress point to achieve success during a project's life cycle. Milestones are the primary tool for project management in SolarNexus. Characteristics of milestones include:

• Usually show progress only on the critical path, and ignore non-critical activities.
• Signify a change or stage in development of a project
• Have dependencies (cannot do one unless its predecessors are complete)
• Often signify a hand-off from one person or group to another
• Often Result in the production of a deliverable, such as a document, or a scheduled event
• Often indicate the need for external review from the customer, AHJ, or utility
• Milestones may have resources (people) assigned to complete them

Milestones indicate the normal path of a project. You monitor and manage the progress of a project using milestones. For contractors working on many different projects at the same time, milestones provide a useful grouping of projects in the same stage. Milestones are also valuable for training staff.

Milestones versus other other tasks

The completion of a milestone may require the completion of several individual sub-tasks. But the tracking and reporting of these more granular task activities may not be required for effective management of your business process. Here are the key differences between milestones and other tasks. To determine if a milestone is needed, ask:

• Is it an important moment in the project that will indicate forward progress?
• Does this need to be reviewed by someone else?
• Does this indicate a hand-off from one group or person to another?
• Is this an event that impacts the project?
• Is this a scheduled event?

If the answer is “yes” to any of these, then it is a milestone, not simply a task.

Time and Milestones

Managing your sales and installs processes is fundamentally about completing milestone tasks in a timely fashion. Monitoring time is a highly effective management method for prioritizing your work, minimizing time to revenue, and maximizing the satisfaction of your customers - leading to good referrals.

SolarNexus includes calendars on which it tracks the start and completion times of each milestone task, and monitors how long each incomplete task has been around.

Deadlines

The milestone Deadline feature ensures that a task is not accidentally forgotten about. Most of your project milestone tasks should have a deadline associated, however, you should only set a completion deadline on a milestone where the time frame can be reasonably expected to be complete on a consistent basis. For example, you want to be sure to qualify a new lead within a relatively short timeframe (like 2 days) and if not qualified (or archived) by the end of 2 days, then notify someone and highlight the overdue status of this milestone. Deadlines (when defined) appear in on each project Milestone in the Status Pane of the Project Workspace like this:  

Mar 3 9:00am

Deadlines for milestones also appear on your calendar view of tasks, showing the time at which it is due. You want to complete all milestones before they are due. Seeing upcoming deadlines help to prioritize your work efforts.

Scheduled Events

When a milestone task has a specific start date and time, it is a scheduled event. Examples include sales appointments, site surveys, start of installation, etc. Scheduled events are most frequently appointments, but they don't have to be. When a milestone is configured as a scheduled event, it is placed onto the calendar, with its start date and time, and typically with a duration. Scheduled event milestones appear in task lists and the UI using a calendar icon as shown below:

Mar 4 10:00am

NOTE: SolarNexus provides an integration with external calendaring systems like Google, Office365, and iCal. See the Calendar and Scheduling article for more information. 

Administrators: For more info on how to setup Milestone deadlines and Scheduled events, see Administration - Project Milestones.

Subtasks

As described above, the completion of a Milestone may actually involve multiple subtasks. SolarNexus does not provide a means to predefine the set of standard subtasks that it takes to complete a milestone. This "regular" case of work should be captured in the Description and Completion criteria for each milestone. However, whenever there is an exception to the standard activities needed to complete the milestone, SolarNexus allows the addition of ad-hoc subtasks that can be assigned to team members and give a deadline or scheduled event time. For example, use a subtask to schedule a followup call, or assign unplanned tasks to resolve an issue like a rejected permit planset.

Click here for more detailed information about Managing Project Status with Milestones.

Milestones and the SolarNexus Project Life-cycle

When a lead is entered into SolarNexus, a new project is created and the "Lead Created" milestone is automatically completed. A lead is simply a project in its beginning stages.

A project's status is determined by the milestones that have been completed. Note that some features of the software are enabled based on where the project is within its life-cycle. For example, you cannot add a solution to the project unless the "Lead Qualified" milestone has been completed.

SolarNexus requires every project to proceed through a minimum set of standard milestones. Having a minimum set of process data enables all projects in SolarNexus to be measured. The required standard milestones for every project include:

• Lead Created (auto completed when project is created)
• Lead Qualified
• Proposed (can have multiple instances, one per solution)
• Sold (this is the final milestone available to Sales Pro edition)
• Revision Approved (automatically instantiated whenever a revision is created)
• Project Complete

Your company may create additional custom milestones to better manage other interim steps in your specific business processes. Common milestones between the sold and completed milestones include:

• Permit Submitted
• Permit Issued
• Install Scheduled
• Work Started (aka install started)
• Work Completed (aka install completed)
• AHJ Approved

Projects in SolarNexus reach the end of their life-cycle in one of four ways:

1. "Archive" is completed prior to a Sale (click the “Archive” button in the Status panel). You archive unqualified leads and lost opportunities (for example, customer is unqualified because they use too little energy, bought from a competitor, or chose not to go solar).
2. "Sold" is the final milestone in the SolarNexus Sales Pro edition's process.
3. “Cancel Project” is completed following a sale, indicating the deal fell through for some reason.
4. "Complete Project" is completed when all required tasks are complete to complete the project.

Ending a project by completing any of the above milestones results in the project and its data becoming read only. Uncompleting one of these milestones can make the project active again.  You can view Archived leads/opportunities from the Sales screen by filtering on Opportunities = “Archived.”  You can view the Cancelled or Completed projects from the Installs screen by selecting the corresponding value from the Projects filter.