Importance of using milestones in project planning

Reading time: about 7 min

Topics:

  • Agile and project planning

We all know the basic elements of project planning. First comes the overarching goal, then you and other stakeholders establish deliverables, and finally, you come up with a timeline. Pretty straightforward, right? 

But what happens when you reach the end of your timeline and not all of the deliverables have been met? Or you haven’t achieved your main goal? Most people are all too familiar with the answer: The project drags on and on. The initial timeline is modified and probably the budget, too. More time, money, and other resources are poured into the project. 

Nobody wants that. Fortunately, project milestones are an easy way to ensure your projects are running on schedule.

Traditionally, milestones indicate the distance to a destination, like mile markers but carved onto a stone. Project milestones have the same purpose, just in a project management setting. They are a tool for tracking your team’s progress toward completing a project. In other words, project milestones tell you how far you’ve come and how far you still have left to go. 

In this post, we’ll cover the basics of project milestones, focusing on two questions: What is a project milestone? And why are project milestones an important element of project planning? 

What are project milestones?

As mentioned above, milestones in project management are key indicators of your team’s progress in a project. Milestones in a project typically reflect the crucial moments of a project’s lifecycle. What are the big steps required to complete the project? These should be used as project milestones, not the countless small tasks that go into a project. 

This, of course, raises a question. What is the difference between a milestone and a task? It’s simple, really. A task is anything your team has to do to complete a project. Any given project consists of dozens or more tasks. 

Project milestones, on the other hand, are simply checkpoints. They tell you, your team, and other stakeholders where you are in the grand scheme of things and how close you are to completing your project. Project milestones are often tied to large, crucial tasks. 

Let’s take a look at some concrete examples. While your project milestones will be unique to your specific project, we’ve listed some common milestones below:

  • Gaining approval from all stakeholders: Without approval and buy-in from stakeholders, your project won’t ever get off the ground. That’s why securing stakeholder approval is often an early project milestone—the rest of the project life cycle depends on it.
     
  • Reporting completed deliverables to the client: Most customers like to be kept in the loop, and project milestones are a great way to make that happen. Say your team is developing software for a client. Each time you complete a major deliverable (implementing a new feature, for example), let the client know and demonstrate the new functionality.
     
  • Completing a critical task: Not all tasks are worth attaching a milestone to, but tasks crucial to the success of the project often are.
     
  • The end of the project: Project milestones are meant to keep your team accountable and on track. And to know if you’re on track, you need to know where you’re going. That’s why your final project milestone should be the end date of the project. As you check in at each milestone along the way, you’ll know if you’re on schedule to meet that final deadline. 

Key benefits of project milestones

Project milestones make everyone’s life easier—especially the project manager’s. If you choose not to use milestones, your project manager will have to keep track of dozens of small tasks to monitor your team’s progress. Sounds like a recipe for future headaches, right?

If you’re still not convinced of the benefits of project milestones, here are six reasons to make milestones part of your project planning process:

  • Help monitor deadlines: Monitoring the progress of a project can be difficult. Deadlines creep up and suddenly you’re behind schedule. Project milestones help your project manager and other team members monitor deadlines and, as a result, stay on schedule.
     
  • Identify potential bottlenecks: Bottlenecks have sunk too many promising projects. Some tasks have to be completed before a project can carry on. If you don’t identify these tasks beforehand, your project will likely get behind schedule, and, as a result, likely go over budget. Nobody wants that.  Be sure to consider any potential bottlenecks and use them as project milestones.
     
  • Raises visibility and accountability: When you set clear milestones and—and this part is crucial—track your team’s progress on a visible, accessible platform, you bring everyone into the loop. Team members and other stakeholders can easily see where the project stands and what remains to be done. And when team members know what’s left to do, they can be held accountable.
     
  • Time and resource allocation: As stated many times before, project milestones help your team know what has been done and what needs to be done. This may seem trivial, but that information can help project managers allocate time and resources to the appropriate aspects of the project.
     
  • Maps stakeholder involvement: Stakeholders, especially external ones, won’t be involved at every step of your project. That would be a waste of time. Instead, they should be looped in and updated at the pivotal moments in a project’s life cycle. Milestones can help you plan when to involve stakeholders in the process.
     
  • Demonstrates success and completion: If you’re working on a big project, the going will get tough at times. It’s inevitable. Team morale might dwindle. Project milestones can help give your team a sense of accomplishment and progress to keep their spirits up along the way.

How to create project milestones

Before any project comes the project planning phase. During that phase, your team will work with other stakeholders to identify and define the scope of the project and, eventually, come up with a project timeline

Once you have completed those two steps—defining the scope and setting a timeline—you’re ready to create your project milestones

A key step in defining a project’s scope is creating a scope document, or statement of work. A scope document essentially outlines all of the necessary deliverables to complete a project, and the work it will require to meet those deliverables. As you begin creating project milestones, have your scope document on hand. Whether you need to identify crucial tasks or key deliverables, the scope document can help you and your team set effective milestones.  

Setting project milestones is a pretty straightforward process. Creating effective milestones, however, is a different story. To ensure you’re getting the most from your milestones, keep these four considerations in mind: 

  • Frequency and timing: It’s tempting to make every task, no matter how small, a milestone. But remember, milestones track key progressions. If you overuse milestones, you’ll simply be monitoring dozens of tasks, defeating the whole purpose of using milestones at all.
     
  • Visibility: Project milestones can help keep everyone on track and in the loop, but only if you make them visible and available. Setting milestones should be a collaborative process. You’ll need input from everyone to set a realistic timeline and goals. And the collaboration shouldn’t stop there. Use Lucidspark to make your milestones available to each team member, as you update, monitor, and track a project.
     
  • Accountability: It doesn’t matter who can see your milestones if you and your team don’t know who is responsible for each one. When it’s clear who is responsible for what, you create accountability. Team members can’t be expected to meet milestones they didn’t know they were responsible for.
     
  • Difficulty: Once you’ve established your milestones, it’s time for some reflection. Are your milestones challenging? And, more importantly, are they achievable? If you answered no to either question, you might need to revise your milestones. Perhaps push a deadline back or reassign responsibility.

With this crash course in project milestones under your belt, you’ve added one more tool to your project management toolbox—and the better prepared you are, the smoother your projects will go! 

Explore all of our free project planning templates to help your team confidently cross the finish line.

Check them out

About Lucidspark

Lucidspark, a cloud-based virtual whiteboard, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This cutting-edge digital canvas brings teams together to brainstorm, collaborate, and consolidate collective thinking into actionable next steps—all in real time. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidspark.com.

Related articles

  • A quick guide to integrated project management

    Learn about integrated project management and how it can help with project management plans. Lucidspark offers helpful project management templates.  

  • Multi-project management: Tips for success

    Discover what multi-project management is, the challenges associated with it, and how to manage multiple projects.

  • 10 essential project management skills

    In this blog post, we’ll cover 10 essential skills project managers need to be successful and how to develop them.  

  • Keep teams aligned across every project with Lucidspark

    In this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into the tools available to you in Lucidspark to keep your teams aligned, up to date, and moving forward.

Bring your bright ideas to life.

Sign up free

or continue with

Sign in with GoogleSign inSign in with MicrosoftSign inSign in with SlackSign in

By registering, you agree to our Terms of Service and you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Privacy Policy.

Get Started

  • Pricing
  • Individual
  • Team
  • Enterprise
  • Contact sales
PrivacyLegalCookie privacy choicesCookie policy
  • linkedin
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • facebook
  • youtube
  • glassdoor
  • tiktok

© 2024 Lucid Software Inc.