The project milestone: a technique for sequencing your projects intelligently

Project monitoring is an essential step in maximizing your chances of success: even if you have planned the progress of your project, it is essential that you be able to control the trajectory that you take while it is running. The project milestone is a particularly effective project management tool to sequence in different phases. Thanks to milestones, you boost the motivation of your teams and improve transparency on the progress of your project.

What is a project milestone?

The milestone marks the end of a stage and a stopping point in the project management process.

The milestone is often associated with a important event Like the signature of a large contract, the marketing of a product, or the launch of an advertising campaign. It is in any case the End of a stage And the beginning Of a other in the life cycle of a project.

So this is an opportunity for a team of Take stock on the entire execution of the previous stage, before moving on to the next stage of a project.

Moreover, the milestone marks a definitive transition to the next stage: once validated, there is normally no turning back in the project schedule.

Another thing: the milestones don't really have of duration or the latter is zero, it is rather a marker that identifies the end of one stage and the beginning of another.

In summary, milestones are similar to milestones, signs on a road showing you the progress of your project management.

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Why do project milestones?

Project milestones have three main objectives:

• Go back to the execution of the past phase: learn from the mistakes made, value what worked, and adapt the planning of the next phase accordingly.

• Control the various deliverables : check that they are all in accordance with what was determined during project planning.

• Validate the launch of the next phase : with potentially, adjustments based on lessons learned from the previous phase.

But milestones are also levers important for Motivate your team and optimize the execution of the project:

• They avoid what the goals set seem unachievable. Indeed, when the objective is too big, it can discourage your employees who then do not know where to start. Thus, by breaking down your objectives into milestones, you increase the involvement of your employees and therefore the chances of a successful project.

• The milestones of a project also allowshun The tunnel effect. The main cause of project failure, the tunnel effect represents the moment when it is no longer possible to know the progress of the work of each member of the team. By staking out your project, you create points that serve as a navigational guide for the project manager and the entire team, at fixed deadlines.

• Milestones are also good levers for succeed your communication with all stakeholders of your project. The number of validated milestones is a good indicator of the progress of the project, especially for people who do not work on it on a daily basis.

How do you set the milestones for your project?

Finding the right number of milestones ‍

What is the ideal number project milestones? Not too much, not enough! No need to ask Wikipedia! To put it simply: everything depends on the characteristics of your project or product, there is no optimal number of milestones.

If you decide on too many milestones, you are probably in the process of Confusing task and milestone. Milestones make it possible to share a macro temporal view with all stakeholders. If you go into tasks (micro) you will demotivate the people on the project because they will not feel concerned.

On the other hand, if you do not time your project sufficiently, you run into a big problem: the tunnel effect. You may not realize that some of your employees are deviating from the initial plan and you are in particular increasing your risks of being in the worst case scenario... Reach the end of the project schedule by missing the mark.

Many teams involve all their members when choosing project milestones: it is also a good lever for engage and empower each of your collaborators. It also happens that you cannot choose all the milestones of your project: specific conditions may be imposed by the end customer, especially when you have to deliver important deliverables to him.

Remember to set a deadline for each milestone ‍

As mentioned earlier, the milestones do not last over time, but are the markers of a change of phase in your project. You must therefore decide on a date for your milestone, and it should not correspond to the duration of the task, but rather to its launch or completion date. 

For example, if one of your milestones is attached to a deliverable, its due date will be the date it is delivered to the customer rather than the time you expect to complete it.

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Examples of choosing milestones ‍

To the question what is a milestone? There is no universal answer, here is a selection of event milestones as an example of a project:

• Assign a milestone for each critical task : the tasks to be identified as critical are those that must be carried out otherwise the entire project will slow down or even block the entire project. If you want to maximize your chances of avoiding bottlenecks, feel free to highlight these critical tasks by identifying them as milestones for your team.

• Assign a milestone to every major event of your project: meet with your team to decide what you consider to be major planning events, in light of the objectives of your project or product.

• Assign a milestone to the achievement of a key objective : you can also decide to mark your project through the prism of your results. So remember to take enough time to think intelligently about the costing of your goals, otherwise, you may end up with milestones that are too regular, or, conversely, too far apart in time.

Use trust in the project milestone

With AirSaaS, the concept of milestone includes attribute elements: responsibility, weight and degree of trust.

The degree of confidence in a project's milestone is one of novelties whom facilitates the tracking points.

For example, you have the possibility to follow your goal of progress of milestones, thanks to an automatic calculation taking into account the milestones achieved and their weight.

Tracking work with milestone information can help limit the drift effect continuously.

Manage by milestones VS pilot by task

In all organizations, managers and managers want to control the risk of a project getting out of hand. In this context, they are trying to set up task management that is materialized by the famous Gantt.

Unfortunately, the majority of organizations are unable to implement this type of project management for most company projects because:

• La Project culture is too heterogeneous In the company
• There is no not enough training for project managers
• The business managers involved are not not trained in cutting from their missions to tasks
• The majority of projects are not no projects that have already been done, As a result, it is very difficult to precisely divide the project into different missions and to manage tasks.
• La communication Between the teams is Not authentic and there's way too much left unsaid.
  

This creates a lot of frustration for all actors.

One Alternative to control of tasks and Gantt charts is the steering by milestones. On this point, discover the article : The Gantt chart: how to use it?