Making Milestones Matter
In our most recent post, we introduced you to project milestones and how they can be used to effectively measure the progress of your projects. To recap:
- Milestones should be obvious—anyone on your project team should be able to easily recognize when a milestone has been reached.
- Milestones should be demonstrable—anyone on your project team should be able to demonstrate to an outsider that a milestone has been reached.
- And Milestones should be progressive—each milestone reached should indicate additional progress towards completing the entire project.
We left our discussion at the issue of how broad milestones should be and how to use them properly.
The Correct Approach? Assign Milestones for Small Deliverables and Large Deliverables.
One approach—one which I don’t recommend—is to assign a milestone at the end of each task. This defeats the purpose of having milestones to begin with. Milestones are not supposed to be redundant follow-ups for tasks.
The correct way to utilize milestones is to use them to indicate when tangible deliverables are complete. You should use a combination of milestones: small milestones that are internal to your team to indicate progress on small deliverables and large milestones that are used to communicate your overall progress to outsiders.
Let’s go back to our software project example from last time. The third milestone (Data layer is complete) is a strong example of a “large” milestone, but it’s a milestone that's composed of many smaller milestones along the way. Let me illustrate this more clearly using a mind map:
The significance of individual milestones increases the further you move to the right on this mind map—the leftmost milestones represent the completion of the least significant deliverables during the course of a project’s progression and the rightmost milestones represent the most significant ones. These rightmost milestones are the most significant because they are composed of many smaller milestones which are reached during the course of your project's progress; when a large milestone is reached it's indicative of many other smaller achievements which have been met along the way. You can use these small milestones to indicate incremental progress to your team and you can use these large milestones to say to your boss "hey, we just delivered the entire data layer this week - looks like things are right on track!"
All of these milestones represent the completion of concrete, demonstrable deliverables, and that’s good because this means that every milestone yields some tangible product—unlike the “every task ends with a milestone” approach. I recommend using this delivery-based approach because it provides you with an additional layer of information for your project chart: completed deliverables.
If you want to try building your own mind maps you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.
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