Tracking Metrics: When Milestones become Millstones

What is a Milestone?

In project terms a milestone highlights an important achievement in a project. It reflects the progress made against a plan. Milestones are used until project completion and make a sound metric to report on the project’s progress. <As an aside: The word milestone derives from the distance markers on roads, whereby they show the progress to travellers>.

What is a Millstone?

Millstones are heavy circular stones that are used to crush grain. The derivation of the expression of carrying a millstone around one’s neck is emphasising a heavy burden being carried.

Defining Project Milestones

The most obvious milestones are the start, end and any points where decisions are required. The other milestones are usually defined at a project kick-off session where the project team crafts and agrees a project charter. The project charter is a key document detailing the project's vision, goals, strategy, team members and key milestones.

Well-defined milestones are critical to the success of any project. They allow an additional perspective of the project, by the project manager. The benefits of milestones include:

• Ease of tracking of major deadlines.
• Highlight upcoming important dates/events
• Identification of any deviations from the critical path, for early interventions
• Identify potential bottlenecks <reduced capacity> and enable the implementation of resolution actions.

Where else do Organisations use Milestones?

Milestones may be known by another name and that’s ‘achievements’. This could be in terms of <the dreaded and dated> Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Performance Areas (KPAs). Similarly, across the organisation there will be some sort of performance metrics of the form… you achieve ‘this’ and you get ‘that’… <don’t we all love the annual performance reviews associated with these metrics? …NOT>.

Achievement metrics are <hopefully> based on the desires of the organisation in terms of the achievement of the formally documented business imperatives (goals, objectives, strategies, tactics). If there’s no linkage between every entity in the organisation and the overall business imperatives then there’s a good reason to either change the organisational entities or the business imperatives, as something is mis-aligned <my guess would be it’s the organisational entities and how they’re structured, resourced, focused and measured>.

Pondering Milestones across the Organisation

If you begin to think of the organisational metrics as milestones along a journey to deliver business imperatives <the goals, objectives, strategies, tactics) then, any that aren’t adding value, are merely millstones. As the number of these increase the result is a reduction in performance with the ultimate possibility of producing a ‘Cliché Corporation’.

Many organisations produce a massive amount of monthly/quarterly/yearly reports in the hope that all stakeholders are satisfied but, unfortunately, some of the metrics used will not assist the organisation’s journey to success. They will be vanity metrics rather than clarity metrics. In summary: Too many <incorrect> reports dilute the core business efforts across an organisation with negative results.

From Data Deluge to Actionable Information

The term Big Data was initially coined by Roger Mougalas <in 2005>. It’s a poorly descriptive term for a large set of data that is practically impossible to manage/process using standard business tools.

In my opinion, the analyst firm Gartner gave the world a massive gift when it dropped Big Data from its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report. <It’s sort of been replaced by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning… but I’ll leave my comments for another day.>

Emerging from the halcyon days of Big Data is server reservoirs of collected data, in some instances, collected just for the sake of it. However, having collected such a vast amount of data it was thought necessary to convert this to information – usually to be displayed in beautifully crafted dashboards containing meaningless static <historical and rear-view> information that is more akin to vanity than clarity… considering that the output was <hopefully> to create outcomes of driving a business forward.

“Vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies. ... Vanity metrics are most often contrasted against actionable metrics, which is data that helps you make decisions and helps your business reach its goals or grow.” – Tableau.com

Actionable Metrics are typically referred to as Clarity Metrics.

Considerations when defining Milestones

• "Have the humility to learn from those around you." - John C. Maxwell
• Do not over-complicate, over-think or over-intellectualise
• Ensure the use of Clarity Metrics and not Vanity Metrics
• Ensure the metrics measure progress towards well-defined goals
• Limit the number of metrics for each journey <information should be used to define activities/tasks)
• Use experience and intelligence to moderate the desire to collect massive amounts of data
• Continually review the metrics used, as these could change over an organisation’s lifetime and any repositioning in the marketplace <continuous improvement>
• Monitor and embed other relevant metrics from across the extended business ecosystem, to ensure full-alignment with all interested parties and stakeholders.

Closing: Without using careful thought processes to define milestones <using clarity metrics> across an organisation you’ll be creating millstones <from vanity metrics> for yourself and colleagues.