What Are Milestones in Project Management?
What is the duration of a milestone in PMP?
They have?zero duration?because they symbolize an achievement, or a point of time in a project.
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.
Project milestones help project teams focus on major progress points in a project, which helps project managers with?project planning?and scheduling. Just as tasks break a larger project into manageable parts, milestones break down project phases to help project managers plan, schedule and execute them.
The Importance of Milestones in Project Management
Project milestones provide a way to more accurately estimate the time it’ll take to complete your project by marking important dates and events, making them essential for precise project planning and scheduling. Because of their versatility, milestones are an important element of project documents such as the project schedule, project charter and project plan.
They’re also used in scheduling methodologies, such as the critical path method (CPM), or project management tools like?Gantt charts, which can determine major scheduling periods. With project milestones, you can better calculate the slack in your project by segmenting the project timeline into intervals, or smaller time frames to control and track progress.
Project management software, like?ProjectManager, makes it easy to build a schedule with project milestones. Use our online Gantt charts to quickly build a project schedule with phases, subtasks, milestones and dependencies.?