Milestones are your best friends. And I'm going to tell you why. But first we have to understand what a milestone is. a milestone is a block of stone that we find by the side of the road and it indicates a distance. And very often, we find milestones or big important places along the route. They tell us we've reached somewhere important.

Or they tell us we're at a junction and there is a choice to be made. Consequently, project managers use milestones as a metaphor. a milestone for us marks a big important position along the journey of our project. And often project managers start planning their projects by identifying key milestones. And some project managers have a very logical mind and they say I'm here, it's today. And the first step I need to get to here, and then I need to get to here, then I need to get to here and here and here here until I get to the end of my project.

They plan forwards from now into the future. Other project managers are equally logical, but their brain works differently. They start at the end, and they work their way backwards. This is where I need to get to but before I get there, I need to get to here. Before I get there, I need to get here and they're here and they work their way back to the present. Two very different, equally logical and effective ways to plan others.

I was so project managers they have brains be like scrambled eggs, and they plan in a random order. I think of a milestone here. I think we're milestone there. For those of you Who are like that? sticky notes and a blank wall of a perfect way to plan. Think of all the key milestones.

Get yourself a blank wall, write the milestones onto post onto sticky notes, and then place them on the wall in the right logical sequence. And once you've got your backbone of your project, the sequence of milestones, you can then start to work on the time lapse time gaps between them to create your schedule. So that's one use of milestones, and perhaps the best known. But if you wander around the countryside, certainly in Europe, you will find milestones not just a big important places, but inconsequential spots in the head robot side of the road, in the middle of nowhere. You think, Why is this here? Why isn't it here?

What's the point? And the point is quite simple. It tells you how far you've come since you lost somewhere important, and perhaps more valuable to you, it tells you how far you've got to go until you're at the next most important place. milestones are progress markers, give you an indication of how far you've come and how far you've got to go. And project managers use milestones in just the same way. If we've got a long task that needs to be done, then we lower the risk of the task by breaking it up artificially into smaller stages with milestones to mark the endpoints of those stages.

So if, for example, I'm doing a project, and I asked you to help me, and you commit to doing your piece of work in three week period, if I come up to you in the middle of the first week, and I say, how's it going? You say it's Mike sky fine, right. And at the first week, how's it going? It's going fine, don't worry. I come up to you in a minute. Usually the second week, how's it going?

Don't worry, Mike scan right. End of the end of the second week. How's it going? Don't worry. It'll be fine. I think middle of the final week, how's it going?

Don't worry. It'll be it'll be okay. On. I'm sure it will. And have you ever noticed that when people say they're sure about something? They're not.

But we've only got a couple of days to go. And on the final Friday, how did it go? Ah, you say to me, still a bit of work to do. But don't worry. I have you sorted in a week or so? Is that ever happened to you?

Course it has colleagues less there all the time. But if at that start before you, you actually get going. I don't just agree with you. But it's going to take you three weeks I sit down they say where do you expect to be halfway through the first week end of the first week, halfway through the second week, end of the second? Halfway through the third week, what that gives me is a series of progress indicators. And when I come up and see you halfway through the first week and say, how's it going and you say it's going fine.

I then ask you the question, have you hit the milestone? Yes or no? Because here is, for me the technical definition of a project milestone. A project milestone is an instant in time when something has happened. So there is no Yes, well, maybe sort of about a milestone. See that happened, or it hasn't.

So gives you a fact. And once you've got that fact, you can then get that kind of shades of gray. Okay, it hasn't happened a week, minutes away, or hours away, or days away or weeks away. The sooner you find out there's a problem, the more choices you've got. You could ask someone to lend a hand you could lend a hand yourself, you could split the job between the person who's doing it, so What else you could handle drove over to someone else, you could reschedule the entire project around the difficulty. You've got lots of choices early on.

The longer you wait, the fewer choices you've got. The more choices you have, the more control you have. And there is one thing that a project manager craves above all else in life control. So use more milestones to give you a greater sense of control. The more confidence you have in the individual who's doing the work, then the fewer milestones you need. So if you've worked with them before, you have a high degree of trust with them.

You've know they have experience in what they're doing, may use few milestones. But if you're working with someone you've not worked with before, or you're working with someone who has very little experience in what they're doing. We're working with someone who's let you down in the past, then all those circumstances would suggest that what you need to do is to apply more milestones to give you more More checkpoints to give you more points of control to give you the confidence you need, that you are in control. And there's an added bonus. Because some project managers think that too many masters a little bit crass. Others like me recognize that there is nothing more motivating in the world of work, in the sense of I have achieved something today.

Milestones are markers for achievement. There are opportunities to celebrate success, the more milestones I put into my project, and the more chances there are to celebrate and there is a much more frequent sense of achievement among my team. And that's motivating and that's good. Like your best friends, milestones will always tell you the truth, because they are Yes, no answers that are provable, like your best friends. milestones are We'll help you raise your mood when you're up against it.