From the course: Project Management Foundations

Learn to use milestones

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Learn to use milestones

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- [Instructor] Milestones get their name from the past, when people placed stone by the side of a road to mark each mile. In projects, milestones do a similar job, but they show progress and other key project points, rather than distance. They show when you've completed key tasks or portions of a project, and they make it easy to see how much you've completed and when it finished. Milestones are great as the first and last tasks in your project schedule. By starting a project with a milestone, you can reschedule the project start date just by moving the starting milestone to a later date. By looking at the final milestone, you can tell whether the project is on time, late or ahead of schedule. Milestones also help highlight progress you've made in between the project start and finish. When all the work leading up to that milestone is done, you have the satisfaction of marking off another milestone as complete. If you're waiting for someone to deliver something, add a milestone to flag that delivery. Finally, use a milestone to flag decisions that determine what happens next in a project, or use a milestone for an approval that determines when the work after the approval can start. Milestones help indicate progress in a project. When you link them to work tasks, you can also use them to reschedule portions of a project. For practice, add milestones to the network diagram in the exercise files.

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