Tasks and Milestones

Introduction:

The project manager is responsible for assigning work to the team and keeping track of the project's progress. When we discuss assigning work, we'll use a few key terms, project milestones, and project tasks. Let's break these down.

Understanding tasks and milestones

Project Milestone:

• A project milestone is an important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project.
• These are significant checkpoints in your project, and keeping track of them helps ensure that your project is on schedule to meet its goals.
• For example, a milestone might include completing the first draft of a report, and the goal may be to ultimately publish the report.
• Another example of a milestone is receiving sign off, or approval from your customer on a major deliverable. Let's discuss how milestones differ from project tasks.

Project Task :

• A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time.
• The work of a project is broken down into many different tasks.
• In order to reach a milestone, you and your team must complete multiple tasks.
• For example, if a milestone is completing the first draft of a report, the tasks required to get to that milestone might include hiring a writer, conducting research, and drafting different sections of the report.

Let's imagine milestones and tasks in the context of By Faith Travels.

?One of your project deliverables is to launch a website for your new service, where customers will be able to register their journeys and get customer support. Some of the milestones leading up to that launch will include securing approval on the website design and implementing feedback from user testing. To achieve those milestones, your team needs to complete multiple project tasks.

For example, in order to reach the design milestone, your website designer will need to create initial mockups of the proposed website design. You'll need to review those mockups, and the designer will need to implement your feedback. Each of these items is a project task, and you won't reach your milestone until they're complete.

The importance of setting milestones

Milestone is an important point within the project schedule that highlights progress and usually marks the completion of a deliverable or phase in the project.

Why setting milestones within your project is so important?

It's really important that you take the time and effort to break your project down piece by piece.

1. Here's why. First, setting milestones gives you a clear understanding of the amount of work your project will require.

The act of setting milestones forces you to break your project down into more manageable chunks.

The further you go, the better you'll be able to see how much work will be needed to meet the project goals.

At first glance, it might seem simple to launch a new website, but it might be more work than you think.

If you break that deliverable down into milestones and those milestones into tasks, you will have a better sense of the true amount of work that needs to be done.

This will help you better manage the project workload.

2. Another reason milestones are so great is that they can help keep your project on track.

When you set a milestone, you assign clear deadlines for when certain project deliverables need to be completed.

Then, as you work through the execution phase, you can look back at these deadlines to make sure that the project is progressing at the right pace.

3. A third reason you'll want to set milestones is that they help you uncover areas where you might need to adjust scope, timelines, or resources to meet your goals.

For example, if you realize that reaching a milestone will require more tasks than you'd anticipated, you might ask a stakeholder for permission to reduce the scope of the project and cut down on the number of tasks.

4. And finally, there's one more reason milestones are so important. Actually reaching milestones can seriously motivate your team and illustrate real progress to your stakeholders.

With big projects that go on for months, you'll want to keep the teams motivation high. A milestone signifies the completion of an important chunk of work and provides a moment of celebration for the team, even if there's more work ahead.

Milestones also serve as a great check-in point to highlight your progress to stakeholders. It gives them the opportunity to see the work that's been completed so far and lets them see everything is on track and up to their standards.

It's also important to remember that milestones must be completed on time and in sequential order because, usually, reaching the next milestone is dependent on completing a previous milestone.

Think about this in terms of Project By Faith Travels.

In order to launch a website for a new plant service, there are a few milestones you need to hit. They are

• Securing approval of a website design
• Completing development of the website
• Implementing user feedback.

These milestones must happen in this order. Here's why. The web developer can't build the website if the design hasn't been approved by stakeholders, and you can't implement feedback from user testing if there's no website to test.

So we know it's important to reach milestones in sequential order, but it's just as important that you reach them on time.

If the team misses the mark to complete a deliverable tied to a specific milestone, it could set back your project schedule, meaning your team might need to work overtime or add additional resources to catch up.

For example, if you need to secure stakeholder approval on a website design by Friday but the web designer hasn't completed the design yet, you might have to wait until after the weekend to secure stakeholder approval.

This will delay the start of the development phase, giving your team less time to build the website. Even worse, this delay could affect the project budget if completing this deliverable directly ties to a payment from the client.

If you miss the deadline, you will likely delay receipt of that payment. You might even risk losing the payment altogether.

Though deadlines are sometimes flexible, it's important to be extra mindful of milestones where the deadline is non-negotiable. And that's that! Hopefully, you understand why milestones are important to any project.

Conclusion:

Milestones are important points within the project schedule, and project tasks are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time to help reach those milestones. Milestones and project tasks are interconnected. Tasks ladder up to milestones, which are crucial for project tracking. Now that you know more about milestones, project tasks, and how the two differ,