Jory MacKay on February 27, 2024 What are project milestones? How to set & track milestones
Most people think of project milestones as just a great way to plan, monitor, and tick off key events in your project’s timeline — but they do so much more than that.
According to a recent survey, 85% of project managers say they’re actively managing more than one project at a time. With so many moving parts, milestones become an essential way to step out of your day-to-day tasks, and get a bird’s eye view of your progress toward the project’s goal.
If you’re new to project management, knowing how to break your project down into meaningful actions, tasks, and milestones is a key skill for success.
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In this guide, we’ll dive deep into project milestones, looking at what they are, how to use them, and the common mistakes to avoid along the way.
What are milestones in project management?
A milestone is a significant event in the project used to measure progress toward the ultimate goal or objective.
But apart from being a significant event, there are no rules on what can and can’t be a project milestone. Depending on your team, project, and project management style, you could include everything from the start and end of the project, a new phase, a key deliverable, a review, a budget check, or even just a crucial meeting as a project milestone.
Unfortunately, while the open endedness of what is a milestone can be liberating for some, it can also make it confusing for others.
The issue often comes up in understanding and differentiating milestones from other key moments or elements of your project — such as tasks, actions, and issues. While there’s a bit of crossover between these terms, they should be used in their own specific ways:
The bottom line: Milestones are memorable moments along your project’s journey that require the completion of many tasks, actions, and issues. But what moments are truly “memorable?”
Examples of project milestones you should be using
To really nail home what a good project milestone is takes time and experience. To start, let’s look at six real-world examples, and why they make good milestones:
- Start and end dates. Every project will set the start and end date as key milestones for their project. This makes sense as both are significant moments of the project timeline, and also sets a boundary around the project for all other milestones to sit within.
- Business case approval. Many projects set business case approval as a key early milestone, helping them track and baseline the project kick-off. Once a business case is live, the project can move forward — so it’s a significant event worth celebrating.
- Sign-off of design documents. Whether it’s a research concept, a website design, an architectural layout, or a process map, the completion and sign-off of critical documents are often considered milestones, especially in creative projects.
- Stage reviews. Many large organizations will review the health of a project at the end of each stage of the life cycle. As a project team, these reviews often take a lot of work and, once passed, signify the start of a new sprint or work package. For that reason, they’re key checkpoints and a great opportunity to reflect and celebrate before pushing on.
- Testing & go-live. Ask any IT Project Manager about the most challenging time on a project and 9/10 will say testing. Project teams often set milestones before, during, and after testing to track progress toward go-live. Once testing is complete and signed off, you’re over the last major hurdle of delivering an IT project.
- Senior stakeholder meetings. Whether it’s a steering committee, management board presentation, or a presentation to clients, stakeholder meetings are a big deal in project management. This is especially true if a big decision or approval is tied to the meeting, so they make great milestones to plan, track, and tick off once completed!
Milestones are a project manager’s secret weapon for keeping stakeholders happy.
Milestones can be any significant event that is a good marker in your project. No two projects are the same — but these examples are a good place to start.
The 5 major benefits of using milestones
While milestones are useful for checking in on your progress, implementing them will bring you and your stakeholders many other benefits, including:
- Providing a bird’s eye view. Not everyone has the time or capacity to get into the details of your project, but many still need a high-level understanding of what’s going on. Milestones are a great way to provide team members and stakeholders with a bird’s eye view of what’s been completed so far, the % of progress, and what’s to come in the future.
- Identifying bottlenecks. Milestones can also provide a great lens to identify crunch points in your delivery timeline. Having many significant milestones bunched together may create bottlenecks or risks to your timeline, budget, or resource controls.
- Creating moments to celebrate. The best project teams are those who consistently maintain momentum and good morale. To do that, project managers must look for chances to celebrate success. Milestones highlight key events that, once passed, create moments to stop, reflect, and celebrate.
- Giving everyone a common goal. As human beings, many of us are target-orientated, using an upcoming deadline or checkpoint to provide extra drive and motivation. Milestones serve as excellent targets for team members, giving everyone something to aim for that’s tangible and will create value.
- Connecting the strategy to the day-to-day. Especially on 18-months+ projects, it can be easy to lose sight of the picture and get bogged down in the day-to-day. Project milestones are great at connecting the project goals and strategy to everyone’s daily work, showing how individual deliverables create impactful outcomes.
As a bonus: Milestones make project reporting easier. As a project manager, admin tasks such as creating project status updates can drain your time. Milestones serve as easy reference points, helping you quickly and easily measure progress and pull together reporting that tells your project’s story.
Step-by-step: How to create, track, and use project milestones
Milestones are a fundamental part of project management — and it’s essential that everyone on your team understands how to use them properly.
Here’s a quick and easy way to start creating milestones that will help you effectively measure your project, keep stakeholders aligned, and motivate your team to achieve their goals.
1. Clearly understand your project goals
Milestones help guide the way from A to B — but without a destination, there’s no way to know where you’re going. Before you even begin thinking of creating milestones, make sure your project goals and objectives are clearly defined and understood by the whole team.
Practical steps to take:
- Review the project business case to gather all the information you’ll need to begin mapping out your project’s journey.
- If you’re starting from scratch, take the time to set project goals and objectives that are achievable. Remember to use the SMART framework and keep the number of goals between 3–5 to prevent team members from getting confused.
Real-life case study:
Brad is a project manager for FitEscape, a technology company that helps young people book fitness holidays.
Brad has been assigned a project to refresh the company’s website. He sits down with the IT Director to discuss the project’s goals and they agree on three: Re-align the website to FitEscape’s new branding, reduce the number of website pages from 45 to 20, and increase website performance by 30%.
2. Break down your plan into phases and tasks
Milestones work hand in hand with other aspects of your schedule. This means they aren’t usually created until the project schedule and critical tasks are defined.
For step two, set out the project methodology and associated phases you’ll follow alongside the essential, high-level tasks the team must complete.
Practical steps to take:
- If you haven’t already, now’s the time to start creating your project plan. Alongside defining your project management approach, the key phases, and critical tasks, you’ll also dive into your resourcing, budgeting, risks, and stakeholders to give you a complete view of the project.
- Once the phases are defined, it’s time to get into the details of task management. Whether it’s a work breakdown structure or more detailed, like the Critical Path Method, use this time to break your project into manageable chunks.
Real-life case study:
Brad gets into the details of his project by creating a project plan. He builds the plan around a 4-phase (Concept, Design, Execute, and Launch) Agile framework, while also requesting his budget and resources. Next, he breaks the key tasks down for each phase and uses reference class forecasting to estimate how long each will take.
3. Look for milestones in key transitional moments
Now that you know more about the world around you, it’s time to identify the milestones that will help you track progress and communicate clearly to stakeholders.
The first place to look is in transitional moments, such as the start and end of the project, the end of each project phase, and the creation of new products.
Practical steps to take:
- The easiest milestones to identify are those around your project life cycle phases. These are key moments where your project evolves and serve as great milestones to show that you’re making progress.
- Projects are all about delivering new and exciting things — so, the creation of something tangible is a good point to track. Identify when the project will create key project deliverables and track them as milestones. Remember, deliverables aren’t just at the end of the project, you’ll be creating them right the way through.
Planio’s Agile boards are easy to use and can help you organize all of your tasks and deliverables in one place.
Real-life case study:
Alongside the milestones at the end of each life cycle phase, Brad identifies milestones in several project deliverables. These include milestones when 10, 15, and 20 website pages have been re-branded and the point at which he finishes the website’s performance testing.
Brad sees these as key indicators that he and the team are progressing and will be a great way to keep stakeholders happy.
4. Hunt down additional milestones in approvals and review points
Where many new project managers go wrong is in only linking milestones to deliverables. Especially in highly regulated industries, gaining approvals and passing project reviews are equally important. Make sure to include those, too.
Practical steps to take:
Look for other key events in your project that could serve as milestones. Here are three great examples:
- Completing a one-to-one sign-off meeting with your project sponsor.
- Attending a board meeting to gain a critical decision from senior stakeholders.
- Gaining approval for your deliverables to be included in the following product release planning cycle.
Real-life case study:
As part of his project, Brad needs to identify 25 pages of the website that will be removed. Brad cannot make this decision alone and must present it as a proposal to the IT Director. Brad logs this meeting as a milestone he’ll need to complete to deliver the project.
5. Overlay your milestones onto your project plan
Milestones need context, and that context is your broader project plan. Overlaying your milestones helps show everyone where the key moments fall and how they take you on the journey from start to finish. They also identify project bottlenecks and risks, as well as opportunities to celebrate success.
Planio keeps all of your tasks and milestones together in one easy-to-access place — so you can quickly see if your team is over-extended.
Practical steps to take:
- Take your milestones and overlay them to your project schedule to take your planning to the next level.
- If you’re working in a long-term product-based team, you can also overlay your milestones to your product roadmap. Just be careful not to plan milestones too far in advance, as it’s likely to change.
Real-life case study:
Brad reviews his project schedule and overlays his phase, deliverables, and approval meeting milestones to show the key events clearly and when they will happen. It also helps him see that there are four key milestones centered around September when he plans to be on holiday. He re-organizes his timeline to remove the risky bottleneck.
Project milestone planning isn’t always easy sailing. Projects are constantly changing and evolving and you’ll need to follow suit.
6. Visualize your milestone plan and share with stakeholders
While it’s good for a project manager to have a plan, the real benefits come when everyone can collaborate, communicate, and understand the key milestones. To optimize team effectiveness, a great milestone plan is one that everyone can access and understand throughout the project.
Practical steps to take:
- Get the team together to review the milestone plan to ensure everyone knows what they’ll be doing and when. A session like this will also help you alleviate workload management and resource allocation concerns before they become a bigger issue.
- The easiest way to get your milestone plan organized and out to your stakeholders is by using project management software. Tools like Planio are perfect for getting all of your tasks, milestones, phases, and actions together in one place, creating a single place for stakeholders to collaborate and work together to make the project successful.
Real-life case study:
Brad gets his project team together to review the milestone plan, discussing the key project events and how they contribute to the overall goal. To do this, Brad gets everyone on a video call, sharing the Gantt Chart in Planio. This makes it easy for him to gain feedback and make changes live on the call.
7. Use milestones to track your project to completion
Milestone planning isn’t a one-time-only exercise. With your milestones created, you must put them to good use throughout the project, using them to evidence progress, uncover issues, and keep the team motivated.
Practical steps to take:
- Milestones help you manage your project from start to finish — so, use them as key reference points in meetings and to help you build your project status reports.
- Remember that milestones move and change over time. As the project progresses, events you thought would be significant may end up being minor, with something you didn’t see coming morphing into an event worth tracking.
Real-life case study:
Brad incorporates his milestones into his project reporting, using them to show what the project has achieved over time. As Brad builds up a good relationship with the IT Director, he is trusted to decide on the website pages to delete himself, meaning he no longer requires a major sign-off meeting. Brad removes this milestone from his plan.
Project milestone pitfalls: Don’t make these common mistakes
Unfortunately, project milestone planning isn’t always easy sailing. Projects are constantly changing and evolving, and your approach to planning and milestones needs to follow suit.
Here are a few common mistakes that project managers make with milestones, and how to avoid them:
- Too many milestones. If you overdo it with your milestones, you risk losing the distinction between tasks and milestones. This will confuse the team, make it hard to track progress, and erode your stakeholder’s helicopter view. Keep your milestones to significant events that add real value to the project.
- Not linking tasks, milestones, and goals. Milestones are an excellent bridge between day-to-day tasks and long-term goals. But many project managers create milestones that don’t directly link to goals, making it hard to know how everyone contributes to the project’s success.
- Keeping milestone secrets. Milestones are a project manager’s secret weapon for keeping stakeholders happy. Once you’ve defined your milestones, regularly communicate them to show the progress, achievement, and momentum to keep stakeholders on board with your project.
- Not tracking milestones in a project management tool. Tools like Planio are one of the best ways to organize your milestones and communicate them to your entire team. If you’re not using a project management tool, you should consider trying one today.
Track major events with project milestones in Planio
Projects are complicated, but effective milestone planning can help everyone see the forest from the trees. By identifying key milestones, you can shine a light on your project’s progress, keep stakeholders happy, and motivate team members.
To make milestones even easier, consider trying Planio with your team. Planio is a simple-to-use tool that provides everything you need to complete a project — from task management and schedule planning, to time tracking, team text and video chat, collaboration tools, and more.
Try Planio with your team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)
