Question

Someone once said, “Life is full of milestones – and so are projects”. While milestones will help you as a project manager mark key dates, clearly identify deadlines, and frame external dates and deliverables; milestones can also be a bad thing for a project. Instead of helping you keep the project on track and more accurately determine whether or not your project is on schedule, milestones may also derail your project and even cause you the success of an entire project. Hence, I view milestones as a double edge sword. Do you agree with this statement? From your point of view and in your own words explain why or why not and use examples to substantiate your argument.

Answer 1

I agree with the statement. Milestones are elements that ensure a project reaches its destination or success. Milestones are integral aspects of a project and provide a transition across various phases of a project. Some of the examples of the milestones include project phase (start and end dates), stakeholder and client approvals, key deliveries, important presentations and meetings and key outages impacting the timeline

Milestones provide the urge to complete the project in a successful manner making the project interesting and challenging. Achieving milestones in a project is an element of success and lowering the frequency of project milestones yield positive results leading to project development but on the contrary, if the project milestones are used in a frequent manner, then it might hinder the projected growth forming a disadvantage

Visibility of Milestones ensures success as they form the project targets to be achieved on a timely basis. This visibility aspect of milestones makes things easy for efficient project handling by establishing standards for project tasks. Time is the most important aspect in the achievement of project milestones addressing the team performance leading to successful project completion. Performance appraisal in a project is made based on the time taken by the team to reach or achieve the project milestone set in each project phase. This increases accountability in a project and increases the possibility of achieving the milestones in a drastic manner. The project manager should be instrumental in driving the team to reach the milestone or else the milestones will not be achieved resulting in a lapse of more time to reach or achieve the project milestone

Risk factors and management factors play a critical role in achieving the Milestones of the project. Proper management of these factors by the project manager and the team is essential for the successful achievement of the project milestones. Some of the approaches adopted by project managers to achieve the milestones include monitoring deadlines in a close manner (listing tasks and dates of completion), highlighting or spotlighting important dates and identifying the various potential bottlenecks involved in a project