Two Fundamental Project Milestone Templates

Understanding how you manage your projects will help you better manage your Milestones.

Whether the endeavor is big or small, a Milestone in project management serves to cap off a workstream and serves as a small point of celebration in the frame of a larger project. Let’s discuss how Milestones can be used, as well as some ideas for popular Milestone templates.

What are Project Milestones?

While the mechanics of Milestones vary, the idea of them is uniform: Milestones cap off a cluster of tasks that exist as a relevant bundle. Often referred to as “a page-turning moment,” these clever devices act as both managerial and communication tools, as they indicate progress to project shareholders and project members alike.

Let’s look at two core Milestone templates that serve to group tasks in different ways.

Time-Based Milestones

As the name implies, a Time-Based Milestone ends based on a specific date or after a specific time frame. These types of Milestones typically embody ongoing workflows that are more dedicated to the rhythm and routine of their work rather than the scope of their initiatives.

Some examples of these Milestones are two-week sprints and monthly content calendars. Should an item from one of these Milestones not be completed within the time frame of the Milestone, it can be shifted into the next Milestone, as the structure of their work supersedes the exact content within it.

Milestone Mechanism: Recurring

Teams who follow time-based Milestones will often leverage Recurring Milestones in Nifty as it builds their next two-week sprint or next month’s content calendar for them to populate with the relevant tasks of the upcoming phase.

Scope-Based Milestones

Rather than being bound by a definite amount of time, scope-based Milestones are completed based on a predetermined (or ad hoc) amount of work. This methodology focuses less on the rhythm of completion, and instead emphasizes the content of each milestone.

Examples of scope-based milestones are client deliverables, scrum workflows, and larger content pieces. These items still have their own deadlines, but deadlines will be pushed to include the scope contents, rather than have contents shifted to the next deadline.

Milestone Mechanism: Dependency

Milestone Dependencies are popular amongst scope-based Milestone teams as it offers the two key benefits of enforcing an order in your workflow based on Milestone completion, and adding reactive deadlines to your Milestones to shift future deadlines based on current Milestone extensions or contractions.

In Summary

One of these two methodologies likely resonates with your team’s style of work by default, though certainly there is some grey area between the two. Do you feel like I missed the core way you leverage Milestones in your workflow? Be sure to let me know below?