The purpose of a milestone trend analysis is to establish a particular trend in your project, e.g. to which date is the project finish date tending.

The procedure is to identify a few key milestones in the project (e.g. commissioning of a certain phase, handover etc.) and to monitor the finish dates of these milestones during the project. By drawing a graph of finish date versus time (date of update), you can graphically show the trend for your selected milestones. This graph will indicate whether you are progressing consistently (slope of graph would be zero) or not, or whether your project finish date is being delayed or brought forward.

Graphing can be done either manually, using a spreadsheet or a project graphing tool such as Graneda.

Example: You are working on a project where you wish to monitor the handover date of 2 particular items. Throughout the progress of the project you monitor the finish date of these 2 items (in this case on 1 Jan, 8 Jan, 15 Jan and 22 Jan).