Milestones
Milestones are the backbone of the preconstruction process. They help project teams track progress, capture decisions, and define design and cost details over time.
While milestone phases can be complex (often involving pricing updates, value engineering, scope changes, design changes, and revision tracking), they are essential for telling the full story of a project:
Where did we start? What changed? Why did it change? And where did we land?
Without a strong, flexible milestone structure, it becomes nearly impossible to organize this story or make sense of all the moving parts. That’s why milestones are so important in Ediphi: they provide the framework that supports everything else in preconstruction.
Estimators are storytellers. Knowing exactly what changed between versions is critical for telling that story, and milestones are the vessel for doing so.
In this article
Current Limitations in the Industry
Today, many estimators rely on packing critical information directly into estimate titles because there has never been an easy way to categorize estimates. These titles often include details such as the project name, design stage (e.g., SD, DD, CD), milestone percentage (e.g., 25%, 50%, 95%), revision count, and due date.
While this method helps teams stay organized in the short term, it comes with major limitations:
- No structured data: Information is stored in plain text, so it’s not searchable, filterable, trackable, or reportable across projects.
- No consistency: Titles vary widely between teams and estimators, making insights difficult to extract.
- No scalability: A single milestone may include 20+ estimates, making it hard to identify the correct version.
How Ediphi is Solving This
To better support your workflows, Ediphi is introducing a standardized yet flexible Milestone system. We now allow you to:
- Define customizable Design Stages for your company (as an Admin): Managing Design Stages
- Create Milestones within projects to categorize and manage estimates more easily: Managing Milestones in a Project
- Improve consistency and reporting across your preconstruction work.
- A new Estimate List to give you a clearer view of your project’s estimates.
Primary Estimates
We know how challenging it can be to pinpoint the right estimate for a given Milestone, especially when there are dozens to sort through, or when you’re trying to recall which one actually drove the project in the past.
That’s where the Primary Estimate feature comes in. It not only highlights the key estimate being worked on within a Milestone, but also provides valuable context across your entire project; helping you see what’s currently driving progress and what’s driven it before.
Why Primary Estimates Matter
Designating a Primary Estimate does more than just flag “the one that matters.” It helps you:
- Track your project’s history: See which estimate was the key driver in each prior Milestone, keeping an accurate record of how your project evolved over time.
- Identify the right estimate quickly: Within the current Milestone, the Primary Estimate makes it easy to know where to focus; especially helpful when collaborating with teammates across multiple estimates.
- Maintain accurate project values: The Primary Estimate plays a key role in determining overall Project Value (see Project Value below for more details).
- (Future functionality) Visualize project trends: Primary Estimates will appear on a cost trendline to help tell the full financial story of your project over time.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team and we'll be happy to help!