PM Practice: Using Milestones

While hiking on a trail outside a Swedish town where I used to live, we passed a milestone on the side of the path. This piece of stone was about a foot wide, 6 inches thick, 4 feet high and many hundreds of years old. There were a couple of features about it that caught my attention.

It was easy to spot from a distance, but it didn’t take up much space. The face of it was inscribed with one number indicating where we were on the path and a 2nd number informing travelers how far it was to the next major town. As we walked along the path, we were either moving towards it or, having passed it, moving away from it. The time that we spent ‘at’ the milestone was maybe a second. The parallels to project milestones make it clear why these ‘moments on the path’ share the same moniker:

• Milestones provide a clear measure of progress and are uniformly visible to all stakeholders. When you pass the ‘Design Complete’ milestone, pencils go down and girders go up. If you’ve still got a pencil in your hand, you haven’t passed the milestone yet.


• Milestones have no effort associated with them. Tasks do. ‘Design Complete’ is a milestone. ‘Complete Design’ is a task.


• Milestones have no duration. They’re just markers on a path. If you stop to marvel at your accomplishments upon reaching a milestone, fine - many people do. But that’s a task (‘Admire Progress’) that has nothing to do with the milestone.


• Milestones are either 0% or 100% complete. There is no ‘50% complete’ for milestones. Once you complete all the tasks needed to reach the milestone, the milestone is passed. Until then, keep working.


• Different milestones may hold the interest of different stakeholders. ‘Key’ milestones are of interest to everyone and often associated with either a major deliverable (‘Test Case Creation Complete’) or a change of the project phase (‘Testing Complete’).


• Milestones are placed with reasonable regularity. I aim for some kind of milestone about every 4 to 6 weeks. Agile Project Management leans heavily on this idea because sponsors need only commit to the process incrementally.


• Key Milestones are on the critical path. As a communication tool for progress, they work better when they don’t wobble around due to float.

Some milestones existing today have been in place for centuries, yet still convey accurate information (Stockholm hasn’t moved). They tend to be stable. Project milestones are similar.