Milestones appear as little black diamonds on the Gantt chart and like diamonds, milestones are multifaceted. You can use different milestone types to mark numerous types of events.
Milestones are unique activities; they have no duration or resource assignments. Like other activities, however, they do have relationship assignments. But milestones primarily are markers placed at strategic locations in the project schedule. Milestones generally either tell you where you’ve been or tell you where you are going.
Milestones may, however, represent a number of events in the life of the project, including: go/no-go decisions, internal progress reviews, deliverable delivery dates, material deliveries, ceremonies, and project completion.
This article discusses the many milestone types and how they may be used in the life of the project.
The many milestone types and their application include the following:
- Milestone decision points or gateways include:
- Go/No-go or proceed or not: the decision either authorizes funding for next phase or cancels the project.
- Directional guidance: decides which direction for project to proceed in based on most recent project data.
- Milestone soft target dates – Break up a long series of tasks. The soft deadline target dates help focus and motivate team efforts toward completion of a deliverable component. Team members and project manager agree on soft target dates. Soft target dates are interim evaluation points to keep the project on target. These soft deadlines support completion of major deliverable hard deadline dates.
- Milestone deliverable hard submittal dates – These are hard contractually agreed upon dates for the submittal of deliverables.
- Milestone deliveries – Constrained milestones are suitable for marking the delivery of raw materials or equipment. This is better practice than simply constraining the related successor tasks. The milestone delivery delays informs the project manager that the schedule delay is due specifically to late delivery.
- Milestone Ceremonies – Milestones generally tell you where you are going or tell you where you’ve been. Milestones at critical stages in the project are often commemorated with ceremonies. These milestone ceremonies mark the commencement or completion of major construction events, such as the commencement of onsite construction.
- Milestone project completion – The project end date is a major hard constraint date in the project. All the dependencies in the network logic come together in the milestone project completion date. Much of the project manager’s effort is towards meeting this completion milestone.
Summary
Milestones function like markers to guide you along your project journey. They reflect major events in the life of the project. When it comes to events milestones may represent you are limited primarily by your imagination. Different milestone types mark numerous event types.
Despite milestones limited features they play an important marker role in the project schedule. Milestones provide an opportunity to pause and consider: where you’ve been, where you are going, how you are progressing, delivery dates, deliverable due dates, and project completion. Refer to the following article “Microsoft Project and Schedule Milestones” for more rudiments of schedule milestones.
For more discussion on milestones, refer to Eric Uyttewaal’s book Forecast Scheduling with Microsoft Project 2010.