What Is a Project Milestone?

A project milestone is a project planning tool that’s used to mark a point in a project schedule. Project milestones can note the start and finish of a project, mark the completion of a major phase of work or anything that’s worth highlighting in a project, such as the production of project deliverables.
Milestones help project teams coordinate their efforts by helping everybody understand the objectives of the project and the action steps that must be taken to achieve them. Milestones also help define project status.

At their simplest, milestones are specific points within a project that measure progress. They delineate project phases and serve as checkpoints on your project timeline. Similar to a video game where you reach a checkpoint after completing a quest or a major stage in a level, milestones help you easily identify which phase your project is in and how far you are from completing it.
However, more than just markers, project milestones are an invaluable management and scheduling tool. Acting as signal posts that mark significant events or branching decision points, they’re used for events such as start and end dates of specific work, external reviews, budget checks, or submissions of major deliverables.

The benefits of milestones

Better planning and structuring

By marking important dates and events, milestones provide a way to estimate the time required to complete a project more accurately. This enables you to calculate total float more accurately by segmenting the project timeline into intervals, allowing you to control and track progress more effectively. Milestones are used in scheduling methodologies, such as the Critical Path Method, and project management tools. They are also an essential element of project documents, such as the project schedule, project charter, and project plan.

Improved time management

Most of the time, it’s crucial to meet your project deadlines, and milestones help you complete the work within the planned timeframe. They enable you to check whether you’re on track, such as indicating whether you’ve completed one quarter of the project within a quarter of the allotted time. Milestones are also visible to the entire team, allowing them to manage their time more effectively.
Better identification and handling of bottlenecks

You know what work is needed to achieve a milestone. If you reach a milestone deadline and haven’t achieved everything required, then you know action is needed to catch up. It’s better to find out at this stage rather than as the final project deadline approaches. Like tasks, milestones can be linked so that the current phase cannot begin until the previous phase is completed. This sequencing of tasks gives team members working on the impending task sufficient notice to complete it on time, thereby avoiding delays for other team members. Additionally, when unavoidable obstacles and delays occur, they prevent others from commencing work on later phases until it’s appropriate to do so. The Gantt chart is one of the easiest ways to visualize milestones, while also showing the tasks which might be delaying them.