The Importance of Project Milestones

When you’re working on something important, be it big or small, you need to set project milestones! Even if you’re already halfway through a project when you’re reading this, take the time to make milestones for the rest of what you have to complete. You’ll quickly realize how useful they are once you start using them.

So what’s so important about project milestones and how do you use them?

Projects are More than What They Seem

Even a project that seems relatively simple on the surface, such as ‘hire a VP of Sales’ can have several smaller tasks that need to be completed in order to ensure the project’s success.

“Project milestones are important points on a project’s timeline that employees can look at for visual progression of the project. The thought behind making milestones is to categorize the parts of a project into digestible sections opposed to viewing the whole project at once; this should motivate your team to complete tasks on time.” – Entry.

Without separating a project into these smaller project milestones, it’s much easier for things to get mixed up or for the task to look too daunting to take on. It’s far more tempting to procrastinate on a huge, difficult project than if it was just one small task at a time.

Using Situational Leadership for Project Milestones

When leadership is certain that all the steps it takes to complete a project have been examined and each of those tasks is assigned to someone specifically, then they can use situational leadership.

“Situational leadership is about adapting the style of leadership to employees involved, with an eye to the environment within which they operate. It is, therefore, more about a leader’s ability to adjust to the situation in front of her, than about personal leadership skills.” – Manage Magazine

By separating your project into project milestones, as a leader you can adapt to each task that needs to get done. This way you’ll have a much easier time finding strategies to get each part completed instead of trying to do things one way the whole time.

Making a Detailed Action Plan

By setting project milestones, each project’s action plan can be budgeted, measured for progress, and supported with skill development along the way. This level of detail will also allow teams and companies to execute much faster. This is because everyone is clear about what needs to be done, by when, and by whom.

“When you’re ensuring that a step-by-step action plan is in place for every project before it gets started, ensure that you include each of the critical components that need to get done to hit the goal.” – Cameron Herold

Each step of the project can have a date assigned to it regarding when it will get done. Then having a system in place to follow up on those milestones will ensure that work gets done quickly, on time, and on budget, instead of sliding down the slippery slope of being overdue.

Try this on your next project. Set specific milestones building up to its completion. It may seem tedious at first, but you’ll quickly learn how much it improves and speeds up the process of getting things done.

If you have questions or would like more information, I’d be to help. Please leave a comment below, and my team will get in touch with you!

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Cameron Herold grew up in a small town in Northern Canada. When his father, an entrepreneur, figured out that Cameron wasn’t going to fit into what they were teaching in school—because of his severe ADD—he taught him to hate working traditional ‘jobs’ and to love creating companies that employed others.

By 18, Cameron already had 14 different little businesses and he knew he loved money, entrepreneuring and business. And by 20 years old, he owned a franchise business painting houses and had twelve employees. He spent his twenties and early 30’s heading up 3 large businesses and coaching over 120 entrepreneurs. He was also the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, and during his 6.5 years he took the company from 2 million to 106 million. 

Knowing that every CEO needs a strong COO then led Cameron to start the COO Alliance in 2016. He noticed that there were no peer groups for one of the most crucial roles in the company—the Chief Operating Officer/2nd in command.