What is a "Driving Milestone"?

Question

I'm quite new to the whole project management thing. I'm studying Project Libre right now. It seems pretty decent so far.

I've found this tutorial on creating and using a milestone block. This way of working definitely makes sense to me.

In the link above the author refers to "Driving Milestones". From reading the document it appears to me as if that means milestones where things start rather than finish. Is that the case?
Does this mean I should have milestones like "Start v0.5" instead of milestones like "v0.5 Complete"?

Answer 1

Although I am not familiar with Project Libre, my reading of that article is that the author refers to "Driving Milestones" to mean externally imposed milestones- the things that drive the project.

Personally I don't see any practical difference between what he calls "Driving Milestones" and "Buoys", where Buoys are the "marker" milestones that surface from the project. When I construct a plan I freely mix the two, attaching to the start or end of tasks as I need them, with wording to match, e.g. "Start of Testing", "Development Completes" and of course the main one "Go-Live!"...

Sometimes I put them in a milestone block at the top and sometimes I leave them inline in the project. It depends what my needs are: If I am showing the plan to senior management I roll everything up to summary tasks and so need to expose the milestones at the top. If it is just for my consumption I leave them inline.