When managing projects, a general contractor or a project manager notes the milestones to create a baseline for their schedules. Project milestones mark significant events and show how far along a project is. They let all the stakeholders know if the project is on track, how it is doing, if any changes need to be made, or if more money is required. The beginning and end of a project, the end of essential parts of the work, and the project handover are all familiar landmarks.
Even before the project, efficient planning starts, making it possible to finish a building project on time, on budget, and to a high standard. However, knowing your project’s milestone can help you create efficient strategies and effective systems so it can be completed on schedule, within budget, and of the highest quality possible.
In this article, we will examine project milestones, their importance, and how to utilize them to ensure a project’s success.
Defining Project Milestones
In a nutshell, a project milestone indicates a specific, important event in the life cycle of a project that shows how it is progressing. It can track when things are due and must be done to proceed with the following activities. A project manager uses these milestones to mark the beginning and end of a project, the end of a significant phase of work, or anything else you want to draw attention to, like the project’s deliverables. Milestones are like checkpoints in an easy way. Reaching a milestone means that a set of essential tasks or a significant part of a project has been finished successfully.
Project milestones help boost communication and collaboration within the project teams by ensuring everyone knows the project’s goals and what needs to be done to reach them. It helps project teams focus on essential points in their growth, allowing you to create strategies and systems fit for your organization. Just like tasks divide a big project into parts that are easier to handle, milestones divide project steps into parts that are easier to plan, schedule, and carry out.
If you need to catch up on a milestone, you can look at their work methods again to find and fix any problems and update any due dates.
The Benefits of Monitoring Project Milestones
A construction project involves hundreds or thousands of separate jobs and activities and a million moving parts. As a result, setting project milestones helps the site’s staff find specific dates or activities on the schedule that mark the end of one part of work and the beginning of another.
In this section, let us look at the benefits of using project milestones to monitor your project’s quality and timely completion.
Setting up Schedules
General contractors or project managers can use milestones to create a reasonable construction schedule, find flexible schedule time, plot activities and workloads, and spot and fix possible delays before they happen.
Single Source of Truth
Project milestones are checkpoints that can be used as shared points of reference for the team. This keeps everyone on the same page and makes it easier for everyone working on a project to understand the goals, responsibilities, and progress. Milestones also help people see how their work fits into the bigger picture and how important it is to stay on schedule. They allow them to take accountability for their tasks and show how the end of one part of a project leads to the start of another.
Keep Track of The Project’s Progress
Everyone involved in a project can see its progress by reviewing the goals and due dates. This is especially important for projects that must be finished quickly. Contractors and project managers can change schedules or plan what to do if something goes wrong by knowing if a piece of work is behind or ahead of schedule.
Timely Payments
Contractors are sometimes paid based on reaching specific goals, like a particular completion percentage. Tracking milestones lets you know if a payment is due or if there is a need for final payments or the release of retainage.
Clear Goals And Workflows
Milestones help ensure that projects are scheduled correctly and that good roadmaps are made. It gives you and your team clear goals to work towards. That way, you can plan your tasks based on the due dates and goals for the project.
Effective Resource Management
Setting milestones can help break projects down into parts that can be done more efficiently. Project milestones can help you determine the resources and tools needed for each activity. As soon as the project starts, you can put their best workers in charge of essential tasks that need to be done to meet the milestone.
Spot and Fix Any Potential Problems
You may need to make changes when it is difficult to meet goals or when you do encounter a milestone, but the work quality needs to be improved. When project managers miss a milestone or hit one only to find out they have much more work to do than they thought, it is a sign that they must reevaluate essential factors. You can spot potential problems by using your project milestones as the baseline. You may find that some workers need to do their jobs better, or there was lousy planning, flawed work methods, more money required, and the wrong tools used.
Forecast Your Project’s Completion
Milestones can help you determine the length of a job. Once you have planned out your milestones, you can change and revise the time it takes and better understand when things need to be done. Teams beating their targets for completing milestones could move their project due dates up, while teams having trouble reaching checkpoints might need to push theirs back.
Keep Everyone on the Same Page
Using construction management software to monitor project milestones can help you and your team on the same page. You do not have to hold meetings, make many calls, or send emails to keep clients and partners updated on the project’s progress. You can see your project’s progress with just a few simple clicks.
Empower Your Team
Team members can see progress by highlighting and marking important dates on a project calendar. Your team can also feel empowered to share any ideas or insights or inform project managers about any problems that might cause the milestone to be late. A clear project timeline makes it easier for everyone to work together.
Efficient Budgeting and Costing
Using project milestones, project managers can determine the cost of a project in the planning phase. Milestones can show how far along a project is and reassure people that the extra money for the next stage will be well spent. For projects that have already started, milestones can also help spot potential money problems.
What Are The Common Project Milestones?
Each project has its own set of milestones, and each manager can make their own. Let us look at some of the typical milestones used in construction.
Important Dates
Milestones can be any significant dates, like when a job starts and ends.
Some other examples are the date of an event, the beginning and end times of a project phase, the due date for tools or training, and so on.
Approvals
Getting permission from stakeholders or senior management is a big step because your project can only begin once you get it. You can also set goals for getting key results, project plans, budgets, and other things stakeholders approve.
Reviews
You can add a milestone whenever your project needs to be reviewed. This could happen in the middle of the project, once a month, or every few days or so. These goals help you see if the job stays within your budget and find any other resources you might need.
Meetings and Events
A significant milestone to add is meeting with a client or other important people about a specific project. This could be a meeting every three months or showing your product before it goes on sale.
Four Tips To Help You Utilize The Benefits of Project Milestones in Construction
How can you and your team reach your project management goals by monitoring its milestones? Here are four tips from experts:
Do Not Go Overboard With Your Milestones
You can add as many goals as you need, as long as they do not go overboard. There is no need for five separate goals in a job that lasts three weeks. Your milestones are the most important events. You can mark other things as high-priority jobs. Your goals must align with those that will be placed in the future. When your team hits one goal, they should be ready to tackle the next one.
Add Specifics
Add clarifications to your milestones and state precisely what is needed to be accomplished. For example, “Foundation Completed” or “Interior Paints Delivered” are good examples of milestone marks.
Set A Due Date
When discussing in detail, each milestone needs a firm due date. It would help if you gave your team something to work toward, not a never-ending list of things to do. With a due date, it is easier to keep track of events and monitor if the project is going according to plan.
Get Your Group on Board
Share a visual schedule with important dates to excite your team. This summary clarifies things, builds trust, and makes it easier for people to work together.
