Background
I'm building a project Gantt, involving multiple teams. In the past I've had a good experience with a Gantt as a means of planning a project but not so much as a means of tracking a project's progress.
I'm trying to figure out what would be the best way to reflect the integration points and dependencies between teams and then track it as easily as possible.
Current approach
Right now, what I have in mind is creating tasks for teams' activities and after each task that indicates a delivery to another team I creating a milestone, with the task as its predecessor. The receiving team's task depends on the milestone.
Example:
==== [Team A develops]
+-> * [Team A development complete]
+-> ==== [Team B develops]
The downside of this approach is that the Gantt gets cluttered with a lot of milestones. The upside is that I get more control down the road around team delivery tracking and an easier way to filter the deliveries of each of the teams. Also, a side benefit is to avoid messing with weird task updates, splits, etc. I would ask for updates to estimated delivery dates.
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts and ideas around this issue. How would you approach this?