Managing Your Project Milestones - 4 Tips
You may remember the discussion a few weeks ago with Antonio, the first-time Program Manager who was developing a schedule for his customer’s new product launch. (Link is here) He and his global project team Zoomed with me last Tuesday. The team is coming up on their first milestone date and planning the associated Customer Checkpoint meeting, and they wanted to talk through the process a bit beforehand.
Checking project milestones in a meaningful way presupposes you set the milestones in a meaningful way. Here are 4 tips for setting and managing your project checkpoints to avoid unnecessary delays. Hint: “Code 80% Complete” is NOT a good milestone! Read on.
• Tip #1 - Early Warnings
It is sometimes tempting to consider only phase changes (sometimes called gates or exits) as project milestones – Exit Planning, Exit Proof of Concept, Exit Development, Exit Design, etc. One significant problem with using only those phase exits as your milestones is they do not provide any early warning to you, the Project Manager, indicating that progress is veering off track.
Go ahead and use those obvious milestones, but add a prior event for each one to help you gauge progress, and give you time to do a course correction if needed before the “official” phase gate comes up.
For instance, for “Exit Planning Phase” you might set “Customer Defined Use Cases Published” placed a sufficient time ahead of the Exit date, such that if that earlier date is met, you know the team is probably on track.
Another example – Ahead of “Exit Proof of Concept” set a milestone such as, “Critical Component Engineering Samples Received and Verified.” (You get the idea.)
• Tip #2 - Cross-functional Effort
Make sure that if the project is cross-functional, that most or all functions that have a stake in the outcome are represented in the project milestones. Ideally, achieving each milestone should encompass the work of multiple functional groups. In the example above, “Customer Defined Use Cases Published” might affect Engineering, Marketing, and the Account Manager for the sponsoring customer, with all those team members contributing effort and driving to that milestone.
• Tip #3 - Insist on Objective Evidence
Each milestone should define in advance the objective evidence denoting completion. The evidence might be a group of released design documents, a supplier quality report, a marketing analysis of forecast demand, or other similar tangible output. “Objective” evidence means it is factual and data-driven, not an opinion or verbal explanation of work that cannot be verified or audited.
As noted above, “Code 80% Complete” is not a good milestone because although the numerical quantity “80%” seems objective, it is not possible to determine how much 80% of the code is, until after the code is 100% complete, so it is prone to subjective reporting.
• Tip #4 - Start to Review Before the Due Date
Review of program milestones should not wait until the due date – begin the look-ahead with some degree of formality so that the right team members are focused on the requirements beforehand, with sufficient time to add extra effort if needed before the milestone is missed.
Project Milestones Bonus Tip
Lastly, if you do miss one of the project milestones by even a few days, it is incumbent on you and your team members to do a mini- Root Cause analysis, and then review the remaining project activity looking for risks, obstacles, and dependencies that might need to be rethought. Be proactive; you won’t make up a 2-week slip without engaging in diligent review of your plans in light of the new information your milestone review has unearthed.
I ended our conference call commenting, “By the way, hoping your customer changes a requirement and you can pin any schedule slip on that occurrence is NOT a winning program management strategy.” Antonio laughed, saying he already knew that! And he asked if we could talk again in a few weeks. That’s affirmative, my friend!
Dann Gustavson, PMP®, Lean Six-Sigma Black Belt, helps Program Managers and their teams achieve superior results through high-impact program execution. Prepare, structure, and run successful programs in product engineering, manufacturing operations (including outsourcing), and cross-functional change initiatives.
Contact Dann@Lean6SigmaPM.com.