In the application, milestone functionality is used to track the completion of significant events or tasks during the life cycle of an investigation. For example, a milestone can be created to track the progress of initial contact with the participant being investigated. Milestones can be assigned a user other than the investigation owner to take ownership of a milestone.
The application provides the ability to manually create milestones. When created, each milestone has an expected start date and an expected end date. An actual start date is then entered to indicate that the milestone is in progress and an actual end date to indicate that the milestone is complete.
In the event that the expected start date for a milestone has been reached and the milestone has not yet started, a workflow process can be initiated to notify the case owner that the milestone has passed the date by when it should have started. Similarly a workflow process can be initiated to notify the case owner that the expected end date for a milestone has been reached and the milestone has not yet completed. An agency may also choose to define its own workflow process in order to meet agency specific requirements when milestone deadlines are not met.
The application also supports the automatic creation and completion of milestones when events occur within an investigation. For example, the milestone to track the progress of initial contact could be automatically created by the system on the date an investigation is created and automatically closed by the system when initial contact with the client is recorded.