Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.
– Nelson Mandela
Some basic tools for project management are simple yet effective. “Milestone” is one of those must-haves in your tool box, when you manage complex projects. To effectively use “milestone” as a tool, it’s important to understand its underlying logic.
#1: Milestones help de-risk
When you drive a 1000 mile long trip to get to your destination within certain timeline, how do you ensure you can arrive on time? A critical thing is to always know whether you are on track, because the earlier you know you are at risk not making it, the more time you have to do something about it to mitigate. You will naturally mark several cities on your route as checkpoints to evaluate whether you are on track based on how much time it took you to cover the distance to that city.
The same applies to project management. When defining milestones, it also depends on estimation of the work and time it takes to accomplish each milestone. Milestones help you to identify risk early that you might not be on track for the whole project so that you can act early and have higher chance to mitigate the risk.
#2: Milestones help coordinate teams
When there are many teams collaborating on a project with complex dependencies, milestones help coordinate intermediate deliverables from the teams to unblock each other. It also sets all the teams on a consistent cadence of progress and creates intermediate integration validations to help identify unexpected inter-team complications early and mitigate them.
#3: Milestones help keep the team motivated
On an air plane flying at the altitude of 35,000 feet, when you look outside the window, can you feel the speed of 600mph? Now imagine you travel at that speed on a freeway with trees on both sides of the road. You will see trees swooshing by at overwhelming speed. The “reference” (i.e., the trees in this example) makes the difference whether you can feel the speed and progress.
On a long journey, people need the sense of progress to keep being motivated. This is the same logic behind the invention of “spinning wheels” on software GUI that reduces users’ frustration while waiting for something to load. Milestones of a project provides the reference points for all the project members to feel the progress. The celebration of accomplishing each milestone also provides early gratification to keep everyone motivated toward the end goal.
Conclusion
Milestone is simple yet powerful tool for accomplishing significant efforts like complex projects. Understanding its underlying logic above helps you utilize it more effectively.