Project Planning: Putting it All Together

Understanding tasks and milestones

The project manager is responsible for assigning work to the team and keeping track of the project’s progress. When we discuss assigning work, we’ll use a few key terms, project milestones, and project tasks. Let’s break these down.

Milestone

An important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project.

A project milestone is an important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project.

These are significant checkpoints in your project, and keeping track of them helps ensure that your project is on schedule to meet its goals. For example, a milestone might include completing the first draft of a report, and the goal may be to ultimately publish the report. Another example of a milestone is receiving sign off, or approval from your customer on a major deliverable. Let’s discuss how milestones differ from project tasks.

Project task

An activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time

A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time. The work of a project is broken down into many different tasks. In order to reach a milestone, you and your team mist complete multiple tasks. For example, if a milestone is completing the first draft of a report, the tasks required to get to that milestone might include hiring a writer, conducting research, and drafting different sections of the report. Let’s imagine milestones and tasks in the context of Project Plant Pals at Office Green.

One of your project deliverables is to launch a website for your new service, where customers will be able to place orders and get customer support.

Some of the milestones leading up that launch will include securing approval on the website design and implementing feedback from user testing. To achieve those milestones, your team needs to complete multiple project tasks. For example, in order to reach the design milestone, your website designer will need to create initial mockups of the proposed website design.

You’ll need to review those mockups, and the designer will need to implement your feedback.

Each of these items is a project task, and you won’t reach your milestone until they’re complete.

To review, milestones are important points within the project schedule, and project tasks are activities that need to be accomplished within a set period of time to help reach those milestones. Milestones and project tasks are interconnected. Tasks ladder up to milestones, which are crucial for project tracking.

The importance of setting milestones

Let’s talk about why setting milestones within your project is so important. While it might seem tempting to make a quick to-do list and get on with the project, it’s really important that you take the time and effort to break your project down piece by piece. Here’s why.

Setting milestones gives you a clear understanding of the amount of work your project will require

First, setting milestones gives you a clear understanding of the amount of work your project will require. The act of setting milestones forces you to break you project down into more manageable chunks. The further you go, the better you’ll be able to see how much work will be needed to meet the project goals. At first glance, it might seem simple to launch a new website, but it might be more work than you think. If you break the deliverable down into milestones and those milestones into tasks, you will have a better sense of the true amount of work that needs to be done. This will help you better manage the project workload.

Milestones help keep your project on track

Another reason milestones are so great is that they can help keep your project on track. When you set a milestone, you assign clear deadlines for when certain project deliverables need to be completed. Then, as you work through the execution phase, you can look back at these deadlines to make sure that the project is progressing at the right pace.

Milestones help uncover areas where you might need to adjust scope, timelines, or resources to meet your goals

A third reason you’ll want to set milestones is that they help you uncover areas where you might need to adjust scope, timelines, or resources to meet your goals. For example, if you realize that reach a milestone will require more task than you’d anticipated, you might ask a stakeholder for permission to reduce the scope of the project and cut down on the number of tasks.

Reaching milestones can seriously motivate your team, and illustrate real progress to your stakeholders

And finally there’s one more reason milestones are so important. Actually reaching milestones can seriously motivate your team and illustrate real progress to your stakeholders. With big projects that go on for months, you’ll want to keep the team’s motivation high. A milestones signifies the completion of an important chunk of work and provides a moment of celebration for the team, even if there’s more work ahead.

Milestones also serve as a great check-in point to highlight your progress to stakeholders

Milestones also serve as a great check-in point to highlight your progress to stakeholders. It gives them the opportunity to see the work that’s been completed so far and lets them see everything is on track and up to their standards.

Milestones must be completed on time and in sequential order

It’s also important to remember that milestones must be completed on time and in sequential order because, usually, reaching the next milestone is dependent on completing a previous milestone. Think about this in terms of Project Plant Pals at Office Green. As we discussed earlier, in order to launch a website for a new plant service, there are a few milestones you need to hit, like securing approval of a website design, completing development of the website, and implementing user feedback. These milestones must happen in this order. Here’s why.

The web developer can’t build the website if the design hasn’t been approved by stakeholders, and you can’t implement feedback from user testing if there’s no website to test. So we know it’s important to reach milestones in sequential order, but it’s just as important that you reach them on time.

If you fail to complete a deliverable tied to a specific milestone, it could set back your project schedule

If the team misses the mark to complete a deliverable tied to a specific milestone, it could set back your project schedule, meaning your team might need to work overtime or add additional resources to catch up. For example, if you need to secure stakeholder approval on a website design by Friday but the web designer hasn’t completed the design yet, you might have to wait until after the weekend to secure stakeholder approval. This will delay the start of the development phase, giving your team less time to build the website. Even worse, this delay could affect the project budget if completing this deliverable directly ties to a payment from the client. If you miss the deadline, you will likely delay receipt of that payment. You might even risk losing the payment altogether. Though deadlines are sometimes flexible, it’s important to be extra mindful of milestones where the deadline is non-negotiable.

How to set milestones

Milestones help give you a clear picture of the amount of work required. They help your project stay on track, uncover areas where you might need additional resources, motivate your teammates, and show progress to your stakeholders. So now, let’s talk about identifying milestones within your project and how you can set deadlines for each one.

The first step to setting a milestone is to evaluate your project as a whole

The first step to setting a milestones is to evaluate your project as a whole. It helps to refer back to your project charter to remind yourself of the project goal. Then, make a list of what your team needs to do to achieve that goal. The big items that indicate progress are your milestones. These are the key point within the project schedule that signify the completion of a project deliverable or a phase in the project. Smaller items, like any item that a stakeholder wouldn’t need to review, for example, are tasks. You’ll plan for these once you’ve separated them out from the milestones.

So let’s go back to our Office Green example. One of the project deliverables is a new website. And as we determined earlier, some milestones through our Office Green website scenario include securing approval of website design, completing development of the website, and implementing user feedback. Mocking up initial designs or building a landing page are smaller items on your list, so those are marked as tasks. Try to keep in mind that some project might have many milestones, while others might just have two or three.

Once you’ve determined your milestones, the next step is to assign each one a deadline

Once you’ve determined your milestones, the next step is to assign each one a deadline. Reaching each of your milestones is dependent on the completion of multiple project tasks. So to make sure you give your team a fair amount of time to complete each of those tasks, you’ll need to space your milestones out accordingly. For a larger, months-long project like Project Plant Pals, you shouldn’t expect to meet multiple milestones in the span of a week. Mocking up website designs and collecting insights from user testing are big tasks that take time. You need to space milestones out to give your team room to complete their work.

To get a good sense of timing, you can connect with teammates to discuss the tasks required to reach each milestone, and get their estimates for how long those tasks will take

To get a good sense of timing, you can connect with teammates to discuss the tasks required to reach each milestone and get their estimates for how long these tasks will take. With those estimates in mind, you can make an informed decision about reasonable deadlines for each milestone.

When determining deadlines for milestones, you’ll also want to consider the needs of your stakeholders

When you set deadlines for milestones, you will also want to consider the needs of your stakeholders. Ask yourself when they’ll expect to see a certain project deliverable, and consider the answer when choosing a deadline. Your stakeholders will want to see regular indications that the team is making progress, and milestones are a great way to show that progress. So to recap, you set milestones by looking at your project as a whole and pulling out important checkpoints that show progress. Then you assign deadlines to each milestone while keeping the needs of your stakeholders top of mind.

Setting milestones: Best Practices

Tasks and Milestones

Set tasks to identify milestones

Setting tasks can help you clearly define milestones. You can do this in two ways:

  1. Top-down scheduling: In this approach, the project manager lays out the higher-level milestones, then works to break down the effort into project tasks. The project manager works with their team to ensure that all tasks are captured.
  2. Bottom-up scheduling: In this approach, the project manager looks at all of the individual tasks that need to be completed and then rolls those tasks into manageable chunks that lead to a milestone.

Most projects have many tasks that lead to milestones. For instance, if your milestone is to receive approval on the first draft of an article that you are writing, you might complete tasks such as “develop outline”, “write first draft”, and “send to the editor”. Then, you may have another set of tasks to achieve before reaching the milestone of revising the article. Milestones serve as check-in points along your project to make sure that you are headed in the right direction toward the end goal. Milestones also make projects more manageable.

Integrate milestones into your project schedule

There is not a consistent number of milestones in every project. Some projects will have a few milestones, while others may have dozens. Rather than aiming to hit a certain number of milestones, try to set milestones for the most important events in your project. Review your project schedule and identify important moments or checkpoints. In other words, pinpoint where in your project you will achieve major goals and make those points your milestones.

Milestone-setting pitfalls

Here are some things to avoid when setting milestones:

Key takeaways: Setting milestones: Best practices

Your approach to setting milestones may differ from project to project, but most projects will have at least one milestone and several smaller tasks associated with each milestone. Setting clearly-defined, distinct tasks, and milestones, integrating them into your project schedule, and using a tool that visualizes them together will help organize your project and drive it forward.

Creating a work breakdown structure

We will start to learn how to account for the many tasks that ladder up to each milestone. You can do this by creating a work breakdown structure. Let’s start with a definition.

Work breakdown structure (WBS)

A tool that sorts the milestones and tasks of a project in a hierarchy, in the order they need to be completed

A work breakdown structure, often abbreviated to WBS, is a tool that sorts the milestones and tasks of a project in a hierarchy, in the order they need to be completed. This is a helpful tool because it helps break down the sometimes intimidating challenges of a project into more manageable chunks. Big projects like publishing a report or organizing a conference seem a lot less daunting when the work required to get there is broken down step-by-step with a clear pathway from the beginning of the project to the end. Let’s look at an example of a basic work breakdown structure.

There are lots of different ways to design a work breakdown structure, but one common way is to create a tree diagram of project tasks. Let’s say that we’re creating a work breakdown structure for the Project Plant Pals website launch. At the top of the diagram is the name of the project. The second level of our diagram breaks the project down into three milestones. These include securing design approval, developing the site and implementing user feedback. At the third level of the chart, we can see each of those milestones gets further broken down into a series of project tasks.

For example, tasks listed beneath your design approval milestone include:

This is a very simple example of a work breakdown structure. Here, we’ve only created a work breakdown structure for a new website, which is just one of the Project Plant Pals deliverables. Keep in mind that in future project management roles, you’ll likely create a WBS that outlines the tasks for an entire project. It’s also important to know that while creating a work breakdown structure is a helpful exercise for visualizing the tasks of the project, you wouldn’t typically include this type of diagram in your official project plan. Instead, you’d input the tasks identified through this exercise into a spreadsheet or your chosen work management software, where you can more easily assign owners to each task. So after completing a work breakdown structure and organizing those tasks in a spreadsheet, a few things should be clearer to you.

After completing a work breakdown structure, you should have

First you should have a set of discrete project tasks that ladder up to each of your milestones. You and your teammates will know exactly what needs to happen to reach your first milestone and milestones after that. Second, you’re now in a good position to assign those tasks to members the project team. Each person should have a clear understanding of the tasks they own and the order in which they need to complete them.

Tasks are typically assigned according to a person’s role in the project

Let’s break down how to assign tasks. Tasks are typically assigned according to a person’s role in the project. For example, in our Office Green scenario, the web designer is assigned to the task of mocking up the initial website design, you are assigned to the task of reviewing that design and providing feedback, and the designer is assigned to the task of implementing your feedback. A web developer will be assigned to the next task of developing the site itself. Sometimes, your team will have multiple teammates working in the same type of role.

To assign tasks between two or more team members with the same roles, take into consideration each person’s familiarity with the tasks at hand

To assign tasks between two or more team members with the same roles, you might take into consideration each person’s familiarity with the tasks at hand. For example, if you have multiple web developers working on the new website, you might task one developer with creating the landing page and task the other developer with creating the “contact us” page.

Consider each team members work load

When assigning tasks, you should also consider each teammate’s workload. Think about how much time they’re meant to be spending on the project compared to work outside the project that may also be responsible for. It’s important to keep everyone’s workloads balanced. You’ll want to make sure that a single teammate isn’t assigned more work than others. you’ll also want to make sure that no one is assigned more work than they can handle. When people feel overloaded, the quality of their work may suffer or they might need more time to complete the number of tasks, putting the timeline and the overall project schedule at risk.

Ensure that teammates are clear on their assigned tasks

As the project manager, you will ensure that your teammates are clear on their assigned tasks. You can do this by assigning tasks with help from project management tools like Asana. When you manage a project in Asana, you’ll add tasks to represent actionable pieces of work needed to complete the project. As a best practice, it’s good to start each task with a verb. For example, instead of just typing “website”, make clear the task is to “mock up the website” or “add images to the website”. Another thing to think about when assigning tasks is timeline. Be sure to add an assignee and a due date to each task so it’s clear who’s doing what by when. Finally, be sure to include as much detail surrounding the tasks as possible to avoid miscommunication. In Asana, you can click into the task details to add helpful information. Here, you can add a description, link to corresponding files or attachments, or even comment ont he work related to the task.

Assigning tasks creates a sense of personal responsibility for members of the team

There’s so many benefits to assigning tasks, but the biggest one is that it frees you up to focus on managing a project. This way, you can feel confident in the knowledge that your teammates are responsible for specific work. But there’s also some less obvious benefits of assigning tasks. Let’s explore these more now. One less obvious benefit of assigning tasks is that it creates a sense of personal responsibility for members of the team. When you assign a teammate to a task, you enter into an agreement with that person that they’ll own the task until it’s completed. Creating a sense of ownership for members of the team is important because it makes them feel more invested in the project. It also gives them space for personal growth. Plus, it supports your own skill-building as a manager who’s a supportive delegator. And on top of that, it keeps your team motivated and invested in completing their work on time. While each team member should have a sense of responsibility for their assigned task, a complete sense of ownership might feel overwhelming for some teammates. If that’s the case, it’s a good idea for a project manager to encourage teammates to support one another on their tasks. This is also great for building overall team rapport.

Breaking down the work breakdown structure

A Work Breakdown Structure(WBS) is a deliverable-oriented breakdown of a project into smaller components. It’s a tool that sorts the milestones and tasks of a project into a hierarchy, in the order they need to be completed.

A thorough WBS gives you a visual representation of a project and the tasks required to deliver each milestone. It makes it easier to understand all of the essential project tasks, such as estimating costs, developing a schedule, assigning roles and responsibilities, and tracking progress. Think of each piece of information as part of the overall project puzzle-you can’t successfully navigate through the tasks without understanding how they all fit together. For instance, many smaller tasks may ladder up to ta larger task or milestone.

WBS Company Event

Steps to build a WBS

As a reminder, here are three main steps to follow when creating a WBS:

Further reading

For further learning on best practices for developing a WBS, check out this article:

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