There are two definitions for ‘milestone’ (www.dictionary.com) ‘a stone functioning as a milepost’ and ‘a significant event or stage…’. Milestones were used to give travellers information about where they were, indicating how far back to a major town, how far to the next. The traveller could see how far they had travelled, and how far they had to go.
It is no surprise that the word has taken on that second meaning, where an event becomes an opportunity to look back, and look forward. And just as the traveller might use the milestone to make decisions about his journey (do I need to move faster, or spend the night right here) the milestone helps us to make decisions about our project’s progress.
Try to incorporate milestones in to your plan, so that you are able to use them to assess progress as you go. This means you don’t have to wait until the end of the project to see if you are on target. You can pause at your milestone and consider if you had expected to be there earlier, or later, and what you have learned on the way.
Milestones are often formed by your logical groups of tasks. For example, if you have finished all the tasks that are needed to build the foundations of your new house, that could be a significant event, a milestone for your project.
A milestone could be formed by the end of a project stage. For example, completing the design for your new house, could be a significant stage, before the build stage.
A milestone could also be somewhat arbitrary. If you need to build 100 widgets that you will use later in your project you might want to put a milestone half-way through, at 50 widgets, so you can test if you are on track. Or 20% through, 20 widgets.
You can determine what milestones make sense for you. Don’t have so few that you rarely get the opportunity to test your progress, nor so many that they are no longer significant. Use them to reflect, and if necessary re-plan. Use them also to celebrate success, reward yourself and your team, and refresh yourself before moving on the next milestone.
Now, with milestones added to your plan there is just one planning task left – working out what can go wrong.
