As a freelancer or person faced with project work, you may have to deal with work overload, so one of the challenges is keeping up with the project milestones that have been set.

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 Firmbee

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 Firmbee!

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.

project milestones 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 examples infographic

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.

Check out how to never miss a deadline with Firmbee:

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Author: Caroline Becker

As a Project Manager, Caroline is an expert in finding new methods to design the best workflows and optimize processes. Her organizational skills and ability to work under time pressure make her the best person to turn complicated projects into reality.