Managing a project can be a challenging affair; anybody with project management experience will agree.
Working with several teams to achieve a final outcome over an extended period of time can yield a wide range of problems. Yet, by integrating milestones into your project plan, you’re certain to enjoy smoother progression.
Did you know that 37% of projects fail due to a lack of properly defined project milestones? That tells us that over a third of all projects are failing not because they don’t have the necessary resources or leadership, but a lack of direction.
If you want to make sure that your project keeps to schedule, if you want to achieve maximum efficiency and productivity, then you need to learn about project milestones.
What Is a Milestone in Project Management?
Successfully implementing milestones in project management can prove impactful in a variety of ways. But to make that a reality, you first need to understand exactly what a project milestone is.
It’s simple, really:
A project milestone is a management tool that is used to describe a specific point in a project’s schedule. At their core, milestones are used to measure progress towards your ultimate goal. They’re a crucial component of a project plan. Not only do they give you direction but they help you to communicate your progress to relevant parties.
Troublingly, some people do struggle to differentiate milestones from other common project terminology. Let’s take a look at some commonly confused terms.
Milestones vs. goals
While goals represent a broader outcome that you’re aiming towards, a final destination, milestones are more like stops on the journey. These stops show clearly that you’re heading in the right direction.
A goal could be anything from the total integration of robotic process automation software to the completion of a new customer onboarding process. Your milestones will relate to that goal.
Milestones vs. tasks
The tasks associated with your project are the activities and processes that need to be completed. A milestone is more likely to dictate when a task, or set of tasks, needs to be carried out.
For example, some businesses are beginning to implement software bots in an effort to raise productivity and lower costs. Learning how to create a bot would be just one task of many in these projects.
Milestones vs. deliverables
Closely related to project milestones, deliverables are the product of the activities and processes that your teams carry out during the project.
Milestones could relate to deliverables that are significant in the progression of your project plan. Accordingly, it’s hardly surprising that many people confuse these terms.
Why Are Project Milestones Important?
Some organizations do not make use of milestones for their projects but still manage to complete them. For the most part, they are the exception.
All sorts of businesses use milestones for project management. Everything from software development to building construction is included.
A project without milestones is far more likely to fail, certainly, but what are the specific ways that a project benefits from milestones?
• Project manager and project team
For the project manager and the team, there’s plenty of reason to use milestones.
Managers find that project milestones help them keep on top of their duties. It ensures they have an eye on the long-term progression of the project, and can allow them to delegate specific duties to the most qualified people.
For the project team, milestones help with progression on a smaller scale. Achieving short-term goals and eventually passing milestones increases employee satisfaction. It makes them feel like they’ve accomplished something special and keeps them focused and engaged.
This is especially important for long-term projects, where it’s natural for the team to feel worn down after some time.
• Stakeholders and clients
You might have thought that milestones are only useful for those involved in progressing the project, but that’s not the case.
Stakeholders and clients will both want to understand how a project is progressing. Milestones ensure that they have general oversight. This can be a major benefit for the communication of potential issues. The last thing you want is for the project to reach its final phase, only to fall at the last hurdle.
Examples of Milestones in Project Management
Projects vary enormously from one to the next, as do milestones. Yet, there are some milestones that are pretty typical for any project management scenario.
Below, you can find some examples of project milestones that should deliver more clarity.
1. Project start and end dates
The start and end dates of a project make for obvious milestones. Making sure that your teams have a clear understanding of the concrete dates by which the work should start – and end – is a must.
One of the reasons that project start and end dates make for excellent milestones is that they allow you to segment your available time for specific tasks and activities.
2. Project phases
Almost all projects are split into various phases.
Having some milestones mark the start and end of each phase is going to give you a clear plan for how the project is going to progress.
The majority of project managers choose to split their project into four phases. These phases are initiation, planning, implementation, and closure. Of course, further milestones can be assigned within these phases. Doing so gives you a greater capacity to track your progression.
Here’s an example:
A business is pursuing broad-scale AI adoption across its organization. They’re doing this to improve their margins, raise productivity, and elevate their user experience.
In the initiation phase, a milestone might relate to the team securing funding and approval for the project. In the planning phase, milestones could denote the assembly of a team or the acquisition of other resources. During implementation, a milestone might be the completion of a rollout of automated IoT devices across the business. During the closure phase, the deliverables will confirm the benefits that the business will enjoy moving forward.
3. Completing crucial tasks
Let’s just retread some old territory: tasks are not the same as milestones. Yet, that doesn’t mean that critically important tasks can’t be used as milestones.
There are some projects where a task might have considerable importance for the final completion of the project. It makes sense to use something so integral as a milestone.
Imagine building a house. As you’re probably aware, there are many tasks that need to be finished before a house can be considered whole. The foundation needs to be laid, the walls constructed, the roof completed.
The tasks mentioned above could all be used as project milestones, they’re all that noteworthy. The key is making sure you don’t use tasks that aren’t instrumental for the project’s completion.
4. Key events and dates
The beginning and end dates of a project, or project phases, are important, but they’re not the only impactful dates you’ll have in your calendar.
There could be any number of deadlines that you need to pay attention to, and using milestones in this way could make a lot of sense.
One nifty trick that many project managers use with their teams is a shared calendar. You can make sure that important meetings, events, and dates are clearly highlighted for the relevant stakeholders.
As milestones, these events and dates will take on elevated significance for your team.
5. Final approval
You’ve gone through the various project stages, implemented new processes, or created new products, so you’re done, right? Unfortunately, you’re not quite finished.
You’ll still need final approval from the key stakeholders. This, perhaps, is the ultimate milestone. Assuming that your initial project plan matched the expectations of the stakeholders and you’ve passed each previous milestone, there’s no reason to think anything should go awry at this point.
How to Choose Project Milestones
You know what milestones are, and you know why milestones are important, but how are you supposed to choose milestones for your project?
It’s an issue that many people struggle with, largely because project requirements are unique from one project to the next. A project that requires you to know how to automate excel differs considerably from one that is looking for a fresh product design, for example.
There are some general principles to follow, however, that will steer you in the right direction.
1. Prevalence
A project without any milestones is certain to experience problems, but a project with too many milestones can cause problems as well.
Milestones can keep your team motivated and engaged, but if you place them too far apart or too close together, they’ll lose their influence.
2. Transparency
For project milestones to be effective, they need to be visible.
The entire team has to have a clear understanding of the milestones otherwise communication could suffer. Using cloud-based applications and integrated software can give your teams the connectivity needed for this.
Having the milestones accessible to everybody also brings accountability. With specific teams assigned to specific milestones, employees are going to remain on their toes. Greater productivity and efficiency naturally follow from this.
3. Complexity and difficulty
Finding a balance between milestone difficulty and achievability is key.
The milestones need to be hard enough that your team grows, yielding increasingly excellent results. Yet, the milestones cannot be so challenging that they become impossible to accomplish. This only leads to enormous frustration.
Understanding Project Milestones: Achieved
By now, you should have a firm understanding of project milestones and why they’re important – milestones not only help you track the progress of your project but keep your team engaged and motivated. So, apply the best practices listed above and your milestones will work wonders for your organization’s project.
This post is contributed to actiTIME by Tammy Wood, the Director of Technical SEO, for Automation Anywhere, an intelligent automation ecosystem. While not chasing keywords Tammy enjoys reading, buying shoes and writing articles about both RPA and SEO. Here is her LinkedIn.
