Introduction to Milestones
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve covered a variety of project planning concepts, like breaking up large tasks and recognizing shared dependencies between tasks. One subject that we have not covered is how to definitively measure progress in an ongoing project, and that’s what we’re going to discuss today.
The Problem with Most Progress Measurement
Actually measuring progress on projects is one of the weakest areas for most project managers—how many times have you been in a meeting where someone was asked “how far are you along with project X?” and the answer was “oh, uhhh, I’d say maybe 50%, 60% done.” That’s not a definitive answer—that’s a guess.
That’s what’s wrong with most progress measurement—most project managers rely on broad estimates rather than definitive answers.
The Cure: Milestones and Concrete Deliverables
There is a cure that will help project managers see clearly through the fog, and it’s called “milestones.” A milestone is a well-defined, solid achievement that is met at some point through the course of a project. The word “milestone” takes its name from the placeholders used to indicate how far travelers had progressed along the roads built by the Romans; every time you passed a milestone, it was another indication that you were closer to reaching your destination.
The analogy accurately describes what we are trying to do when we manage our projects: we want to define clear indicators that tell us how close we are to reaching our goal. So let’s take a look at some sample milestones for a software engineering project:
- Milestone 1 – All of the design specifications and the design specification documents are complete.
- Milestone 2 – All members of the development team have individual assignments and set deadlines. Work on the software itself can begin.
- Milestone 3 – Data layer is complete. Testing is ongoing.
- Milestone 4 – Business layer is complete. Testing is ongoing.
- Milestone 5 – Presentation layer is complete. Testing is ongoing.
- Milestone 6 – All major errors and bugs are resolved. Minor bug fixing and testing is ongoing.
- Milestone 7 – Project ships.
Even though these milestones are pretty broad, these are good milestones in that they are very definitive. For instance, the data layer is complete when all of the functionality defined in the project’s requirements is satisfied. A good, definitive milestone is one that every team member recognizes once it has been met. Compare this to the old approach, which is that a milestone has been met only once the project manager thinks it has been met.
The value of having these definitive milestones is thus: when asked “how far along are you on your project?” you can safely answer, “we’ve reached four of our seven milestones so progress is coming along smoothly; following the schedule set on our Gantt chart, we expect to have reached our final milestone by mid-January.” This brings up my final point for this article: integrating milestones into our project charts and schedules.
Integrating Milestones into Project Charts
For this post, I’m going to reuse my “buying a new SUV” example project from my recent post about using project charts for scheduling.
Here is my original project chart, without any milestones:
I’m going to keep this example simple and stick to just the broad tasks and broad milestones for the sake of brevity. Now, each of these major tasks should have a milestone. Rather than list all of my milestones, I’ll show them to you on a new project chart:
I’ve highlighted my milestones on the project chart—these are all deliverables that have to be completed before the next set of tasks can begin and they are an effective way of determining how far along you are in the course of your project. The first milestone is when I’ve decided what range of cars I want to drive and the second milestone is when I’ve found a specific car that I want to purchase and so forth.
Adding milestones to a project chart is pretty trivial—the hard part is determining the right kind of milestones to begin with. Ideally, you want to create a set of definitive milestones which accurately reflect how far along your project is. In our next article we’re going to get into a bit more detail about how broad milestones should be and how to use them properly.
If you want to try building your own project charts you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.
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