Project Management 101: What are Milestones?

In reference to Project Management, a milestone is a special event that requires special attention. Milestones can add significant value to project scheduling. They help project managers to more accurately determine whether or not the project is on schedule.

There are two most common ways of using milestones:

1. Create it as a single-day task to be used as a marker on the project schedule, indicating that a certain objective is achieved;
2. Create it as a  parent task, containing all other sub-tasks which are required to complete a certain objective.

We recommend using the 2nd method because it allows you to better control your schedule and see what is left to be done in order to complete your milestone.
For example, if you’re rolling out a new website, you might have three major milestones:

• Create new design;
• Migrate content to the new design;
• Publish new website.

Then when you add all the required tasks to the corresponding milestones, your project schedule might look like this:

Later, it’ll be easy for you to check the status of your project progress by running the Milestone report.

Additional information is available in our Online Help:
Project Management Online Help – Birdview PSA

Questions? Ask away using the comments section below.

This post is a part of our ongoing Project Management 101 series.