Project milestones – table of contents:

1. What are project milestones
2. Project milestones – top 6 examples
3. Project milestones: The Bottleneck should be taken into consideration
4. Check out how to never miss a deadline with ¿­·¢k8Æì½¢Ìü

To execute any project, you need a well-structured plan. You need to know how to use milestones in project delivery. A project plan helps you figure out the course and way to successfully carry out a project. It encompasses how you choose to begin and finish your project. With a project plan, it can be very easy for you to start the project, enjoy it, finish the project on time and deliver it to your prospective clients. The basic and most important project plan you can have is to develop a milestone.

What are project milestones?

Before we talk about project milestone examples, let me define a milestone. It is an indicator that helps understand the stage or progress of a project. Milestones are one of the most effective tools for a proper project management. The reason is that project milestones tell you about how well you are progressing by indicating a notable timeline as you progress in your project. Project milestones can show you the state of your project. By the way, if you’re looking for a great tool to manage projects and set reasonable milestones choose ¿­·¢k8Æì½¢Ìü!

Like it’s been mentioned project milestones help you to keep tabs on how you are progressing in a given project through indicators or using dates, events, decisions, and any other related indices that could be used.

Project milestones – top 6 examples

1. Start and end dates

This is one of the most important project milestones examples you can ever set for most projects. This is because most people giving out projects are generally interested in when the project is starting and when it would end. As a freelancer or a person working on a project, you should set this as your 1st milestone example.

2. Have an established key delivery for your client

Key deliverables are the tangible product of a particular process but in this case, key deliverables are tangible products of the process of completing a project milestone. If the project is going to be a long time project, then you need to establish clear deliverables that would be useful in tracking your progress. It could also be helpful to the client as the client can critique the quality of work to increase the quality of work done. It would be wrong to deliver the whole project at once, and so it would be helpful if you have specific or unambiguous deliverable milestones.

3. The approval of your clients and relevant stakeholders

In setting project milestones, it is important to consider the convenience of the people you are working for. They need to approve the project.

4. Set related deadline

Every project plan requires that a related deadline. This related deadline is set and used in defining your project milestone, especially for your key deliverables. That means as you are setting your key deliverables, you should set them with a deadline in view.

And so why are you doing this? Just like I stated long-time project requires that you break them into bits so that the quality of work produced can be better improved. Most people or clients always prefer to have a top-level view of the state of the business. Setting key deliveries without setting the deadline is of no essence.

5. Setting or arranging for meetings and necessary presentations

Project milestones are all about feedback and one example of project milestones is arranging meetings and presentations. This particular example may not always apply to all projects. It’s suitable for projects that probably require building or presentation. In such cases, your project milestones have to be informed of holding meetings and presentations to give your clients and boss feedback.

6. Note the crucial date of the project

For some projects, some important days or timelines might define the project as they are essential to the successful delivery of the project in one way or the other. For example, maybe a training or onsite inspection or experiment is to be carried out on a particular day or date which would require that you are physically present and note the result from that event. And so in your milestone management, dates like this must and should be included as part of your milestones. They naturally fit in into the timeline as the result from them has a way of impacting the result of the project. And so they should be included in your milestone plan.

Project milestones: The Bottleneck  should be taken into consideration

Depending on the type of project you are taking, there are some types of projects that are heavily dependent on what is produced from an external source. Without this result, the project might not work out and so it is only reasonable to set your milestones with this in mind. But the only difference the delivery is not dependent on you. But you can use it to monitor them to convince them to speed up their work.

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It’s the combined costs of all activities, workforce, tasks, and materials which will lead you to the final project. That’s why you should carefully plan your project before diving into the finances. How to do it properly? Good project management tools will definitely help.

Project budget management – how to do it properly?

It’s important to have a project budget because this will give you a good understanding of how things (and spendings!) are moving forward. You’ll have control of all the activities and immediately know when the costs will be growing too high. This knowledge will definitely support your decisions through the whole process and make you wiser while planning the next projects.

To conduct project budget management define the scope of the project

How can you count your project budget without knowing the details of your project? This is where defining the scope of the project comes with help. Defining the scope of a project means documenting a list of specific project goals, team members, milestones, tasks, deliverables, features, functions and deadlines. It will also include any major project objectives, deliverables, and goals to help measure success. Lot’s of PM tools will help you with organizing all this stuff. One of them is ¿­·¢k8Æì½¢Ìü.

Estimation techniques

Okay, you’ve got your plan so how to start counting the money? Estimation techniques can help. A brief summary of them can be found below. Decide which one is proper for you & dig deeper into the topic.

Bottom-up estimation

This is a technique of estimating individual tasks and then combining them into an overall project estimate. By this time you should already know which team member is responsibe for what (if not – check out our solution), you can ask each person performing a task to provide you with the estimates. They are definitely in a better position to estimate a task that they will be working on. After you have a cost estimation of work at the lowest possible level of detail, aggregate them in order to arrive at summary totals.

Top-down estimation

Here, groups of experienced managers or external experts try to estimate the budget of the project. You can also use information from a previous, similar project. This technique is often used in the very early phases of a project when not much information is available. Unlike the bottom-up estimation, this time you will estimate the duration of deliverables and/or major deliverables.

Analogous estimation

The phrase analogous estimating comes from the fact that you use a similar past project to estimate the duration or cost of your current project. It should be a mix of historical information and expert judgment. That’s why it’s so important to track your project budget each time you deliver something.

Parametric estimation

Parametric estimating is a statistics-based technique which helps you calculate the expected amount of financial resources or time that is required to finish a project. With parametric estimation, there is going to be some more math needed, but just some basic skills, so don’t be terrified! Look at this example:

Let’s say that your project includes interviewing 300 people. Each interview contains 10 multiple-choice questions, and past experience has shown that they take 20 minutes to administer. The total effort for this task will be:

Nr of interviews × 20 minutes = 6000 minutes = 50 hours

Now, from your past experience check how much an hour of workforce costs. Done!

Automate the process

Remember, you don’t have to do everything by yourself using notes or calculators. Project management systems can calculate the budget for you based on the scope of the project and help you store and organize the information. ¿­·¢k8Æì½¢Ìüs finance module lets you set a project budget, calculate employee costs, track your income and expenses during the whole process. After the project is finished, the information is automatically rolled over into invoices. Also, information about what you owe others is displayed.

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3 reasons why to use project management tools

1. Easy Planning

The complexity of projects varies. Some of them are simple, some of them complicated. Regardless, the first step of each project is (or should be) proper planning. It saves your time and gives a broad picture. So, you started to plan and see the whole plan, now it’s the time to break it into tasks and prioritize them. If until that moment you didn’t use a project management tools, it should enter the stage now.

The right project management tools are really helpful when you need to establish a hierarchy of tasks you need to accomplish to reach the target. That is, to complete a project. However, tasks are not equal. Some of them are more important than others. A good project management tools provide a possibility to create a hierarchy and sequence of tasks, as well as show which of them depend on one another. This saves a lot of time for a leader, who assigns tasks, as well as for the whole team. Every project participant knows what to do now, what to do next, and what is the deadline for each step.

2. Task Management

Every project is, well, a process. Regardless if you’re running single or with a team, there is one goal – to finish the race as fast and as good as possible. And finishing the run is impossible if you forget taking steps. Each task is a small step that leads to the end of a run. A project management tool is essential to reach the goal.

Thanks to that you can assign all the important tasks to proper persons and track its progress. That makes managing projects much easier, cause you have access to important data and can check who is responsible for which task. All of that makes teamwork more efficient as every team member knows exactly what to do. And even if he doesn’t, he knows who to ask. It’s more important than some believe. According to a , lack of workforce time for collaboration is one of the top barriers to successful collaboration in an organization. How to avoid it? Well, using a project management tools that let you regularly check in with your team is key.

3. Project Tracking in project management tools

Ok, you’ve got a plan and you’ve assigned particular tasks. The project is going the right way. Awesome! Is it the time to break out the champagne? Not so fast my friend.

Project tracking is a third important reason why should you use a project management tools. It helps to gather information not only about the process itself but also about the team members. People have different skills and strengths, some of them are hidden. Proper project tracking may uncover them!

Tracking also provides an insight into every step and allows to estimate the time for each task. It’s essential for the current and future project, as it gives opportunities to predict how much time the upcoming projects may consume. To cut a long story short, thanks to that you can generate future results quicker and better.

Easy planning, task management, and project tracking are the three main reasons why should you use a project management tools. Of course, the choice of a perfect project management tool for you requires consideration of more issues. It depends on the type of projects, your needs, the services you want to use, and, last but not least, the pricing.

¿­·¢k8Æì½¢Ìü allows you not only to manage your projects and tasks, but also to control finances, invoice, manage customer relationships and find a perfect employee match.

Maybe you’ve just found perfect project management tool?