Milestones Early Access
Milestones is currently in early access. To join the waiting list, email support@cxalloy.com.
Features in early access may change prior to release.
In this article
Milestones Overview
Milestones is a new project section that enables you to create customizable goals from a wide variety of criteria and automatically track progress towards those goals.
Milestones can be linked to nearly all content within a project so that progress towards achieving a milestone happens automatically just from updating a project's equipment, issues, checklists, tests, or any other supported area.
Milestones can have anticipated completion dates, introducing the tracking of schedule requirements into CxAlloy for the first time. Milestones can be organized into milestone groups, enabling the construction of two-tier requirements hierarchies.
Milestones Structure
The core component of the Milestones section is the Milestone Collection. The Milestone Collection defines which items you are tracking. To do so you pick a project section such as equipment, systems, or checklists. You then refine which items should be included using filters. For example, you might create a Milestone Collection for equipment that includes only equipment of type “Air Handling Unit”.
After you choose which items belong in the collection you define one or more Milestones within that collection. Each Milestone contains the rules that must be met to be considered complete. For example, you might create a Milestone called “Checklists Finished” that requires all the checklists connected to each equipment to have status “Finished”.
You can create as many Milestones as you would like within a Milestone Collection.
Comparison to Excel-based Progress Trackers
The structure of Milestone Collections and Milestones can be compared to a common pattern we see in Excel-based commissioning progress trackers.
In Excel progress trackers it’s common to see a row for each piece of equipment, with columns representing specific milestones (such as “Checklists Complete”, “Tests Passed”, etc.).
In CxAlloy’s approach, the rows of the spreadsheet are defined by the Milestone Collection, and the Milestones are the spreadsheet’s columns.
Early Access Expectations
We are initially releasing Milestones in Early Access. In this Early Access period we are looking for feedback as we continue to develop additional functionality. During Early Access you can expect that existing features may change and new features will be added.
We will be taking the feedback we get during Early Access, as well as our own monitoring of performance and usage, and fold it into our development efforts.
We expect Early Access to continue for several months.
Help and Support During Early Access
Milestones will be fully supported during Early Access. You can email support with questions and we will have Milestones documentation available at support.cxalloy.com.
Milestones Roadmap
During Early Access
We have many additional features that we will be developing during Early Access. Four key features that will be added during Early Access are milestone presets, PDF reports, Excel exports, and an improved milestone creation flow.
Milestone Presets
Milestone presets will allow you to create predefined milestone configurations that you can then easily apply within your projects.
PDF Reports
PDF reports will allow you to generate nicely formatted PDFs of your milestone data. PDFs will support all content including charts and the item grid.
Excel Exports
Excel exports will create an Excel spreadsheet based on your milestones. We are aiming to make these spreadsheets similar in design and structure to the Excel-based commissioning progress trackers that we’ve seen our customers create.
Improved Milestone Creation Flow
The improved milestone creation flow will make it easier to create Milestone Collections and easier to understand the relationship between the Milestone Collection and its child Milestones.
After Early Access
We will continue to improve and expand on milestones after Early Access. We already have many ideas about additional features to add and we anticipate that you, our users, will provide many more.