What is a Milestone in Project Management?

With a steady rise in the number of businesses, the trend is changing with the focus shifted to small and medium businesses. This pragmatic shift has turned the spotlight on entrepreneurs who are more “Business Ready” than ever to take over projects. Businesses are looking for a one-stop cloud application offering CRM, Invoicing, and Project Management software, that is all-in-one. In this competitive ecosystem, the fittest will survive while the doors are closed for others in the business.

One of the most significant factors essential for the success of a business is the completion of the projects before the targeted date. An integrated CRM and Project Management system is encouraged for the efficient planning, tracking, and management of the projects. Customers prefer businesses that communicate on the status of the project regularly, and Apptivo is an interactive cloud software offering CRM and Project Management in an integrated platform.

An overview of project planning

When work is planned properly, it equals half done. Project planning is a must for companies to reduce the aftermaths faced during the final stage of projects. To make the planning process simple, companies have to determine the project management method and leverage the required tools that boost the planning process, identify the shortcomings and have automation. Before discussing in detail the definition of a milestone, milestone management, and milestone tracking, let’s go through the basic tools associated with project management and milestones.

What are the best project management tools?

Project management is seldom a simplified task unless there is a proper process to manage it. It is often an integration of different tools that keeps your project going. So, What are the tools used for project planning? A tool to document the incoming projects, track their status, breaking down of projects based on different stages, and collaborate with teams effortlessly. Everything you need for project management is discussed below.

Team Collaboration – One of the prime concerns of businesses, when it is about project planning, is the interaction among teams and their customers. The secondary concern is the documentation process of these interactions. By having a dedicated project management system, project members can interact with each other and customers. Furthermore, they can document the interactions through dedicated collaboration tools.

These collaborative tools when implemented in your project planning can reduce the time spent on unnecessary tasks that involve contacting the previous employee for more details on the interaction status. This also includes the feedback provided by the customers. It wouldn’t be nice to ask for the same feedback from customers again and again, would it? So, it is recommended to have a system through which all the stakeholders can interact without any trouble.

File Management – Project management involves several pieces of paperwork. Right from acquiring the project to completing it, you have to deal with a number of documents. If the document management is carried out through the conventional document management process of bookkeeping, each team member has to go through the process of locating the file and gathering the information. If more than two members of the team try to access a particular document, then there is a high probability that one member wouldn’t get a hand over it.

To tackle this, imagine having a single software that can manage the documents from a single platform. Additionally, this also provides access to multiple employees at a time. Isn’t it an advantageous factor? The Projects app should be equipped to upload documents from multiple platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and your computer. Through this, all the documents can be collected in a single section and it is accessible only to selected members of the team.

Project Tracking – To make the process of managing projects easier, companies normally ask their project managers to break the projects into different phases, also called Milestones. These Milestones are further divided into tasks. Companies normally ask about the status of the projects through the milestones reached or the status of a particular task. Also, the milestone schedule in the project plan takes precedence when compared to other factors related to project development. So, most of the project management software has a pre-defined milestone feature for better management of projects.

When the project management solution is integrated with your project team’s operations, project managers can easily speculate the entire project through the system. The project managers can create milestones, add tasks, assign them to the right members, and determine the time period. Through this, the entire project can be monitored and inputs can be shared whenever needed to get projects completed before deadlines. Also, team managers can know the status of the projects without any communication with the team members through Gantt charts.

Reporting & Dashboard – Metrics in project management helps to analyze the quantitative and qualitative factors in the projects. Metrics help to plan the costs of the project, determine the cost-saving solution, evaluate the status of projects, monitor the performance of employees, and take corrective actions to improve the performance of projects. Project managers also find it easy to meet the deadlines if there are appropriate tools to generate reports and view dashboards.

Project management solutions offer exceptional reporting and dashboard facility that allows project managers to easily to pull out the necessary data without disrupting the project workflow. In short, project managers need not reach out to a particular employee to gather the information manually. Instead, the project managers can collect all the data with a click through cloud-based solutions. The advanced filters in dashboards narrow down the required information and remove any type of redundancy in the results. Also, these reports and dashboards can be shown to all the stakeholders while notifying the project status.

What are key milestones in project management?

Milestones are scheduling tools used to track the progress of the projects at an optimized level. They can be used to mark the major phases of the project with an appropriate timeline. Conventionally, tasks are used to split the projects and track the projects until the completion. While this is a commonly used method, it becomes tedious if there are too many tasks.

Adding Milestones in project management will create the additional edge needed to outshine in comparison to other competitors. The Projects App of Apptivo is a carefully established application that goes along with any business. Milestones of Apptivo is a state-of-art powerhouse designed to offer the highest level of productivity to businesses.

What is an example of a milestone?

Project milestone has a wide range of applications in a number of sectors like engineering, medicine, research, development, construction, social sectors, and other prominent industries. With that said, milestone management is considered a very important tool in the project management process.

Picture this: An example of milestone management services. You own a construction company and you have signed up for a project management software like Apptivo to track all your projects. Since you develop projects in phases, milestone tracking is a key factor in this process. Consider, your phase 1 is design approval, then this can be taken into account as a milestone. Here, you can record and monitor all the activities related to your design approval right from creating a design, developing it, and getting approval from all the stakeholders. This way, all the associated parties will be confident with your business. Once this phase is complete, you can kick-start the second phase, say, sending for development. Likewise, you can document each phase as milestones and track their progress through efficient project management software.

Milestone in Project Management

In this blog, we have listed some of the key milestone features in Apptivo’s project management solutions that will boost your business productivity.

Smooth Allocation of Resources

Using Apptivo’s Milestones, Project Managers can quickly organize the projects. They can easily assign the milestones to employees and allocate the resources for the projects on budget. Having Milestones will enable the teams to identify the bottlenecks and prioritize their tasks. A collaborative workspace is made possible with Apptivo’s Project Management software. The milestones in project planning help to assess the resources needed to complete the project, request for new resources in case of any unforeseen circumstances and determine the cost of the total project.

Identification of Critical Dates

Milestones in the Projects App permits users to effortlessly track the important dates associated with a project. Businesses can work without friction with the knowledge of important dates and carry out their tasks with minimum stress. The application of Milestones will reduce the time used in planning and shifts the man-hours on completion of tasks before the deadlines. The critical dates also included the completed activities. With this, businesses can effortlessly identify the previous activities, take steps to curb its ill effects, and promote simplified project management.

Increased Accountability with Reports

Milestones give broader information to the stakeholders on the performance of the projects. Stakeholders are more interested in knowing the outcome and this can be shown as a report when businesses use Milestones. Research shows customers have an increased affinity to honest businesses. Users can accurately generate reports based on Milestones with Apptivo’s built-in reports and showcase them to the customers. The reports display the status of milestones, assignee, and other relevant information. This report can be filtered for a particular time period and exported for offline purposes.

Milestone Payments

The Milestone billing method provides comprehensive information on the payments to be made and collected based on the milestones. Once a milestone is completed, the fee can be charged and revenue can be identified without any hassle. It will also help to forecast the fee and revenue for the forthcoming milestones. All the stakeholders of the project can track and compare the pricing involved in different milestones associated with a project. The milestone payments are the right option for businesses that require the collection of payments through milestones.

Boost Your Team Morale

A Study has shown that there is a 13% increase in productivity when the employees are happy and satisfied. This sense of satisfaction is created by Milestones. As employees complete each milestone and report their success, they are motivated to work harder and increase the success rates. The Gantt Charts of Apptivo is one of the best project monitoring features displaying precise data on Milestones with an advanced dashboard facility. The Gantt charts are available for individual projects and all projects together. They display the progress of the projects based on milestones and tasks along with the start date, end date, and duration of each activity.

Key to Progress

Implementing milestones in projects will certainly assist your business in accelerating team management. With its application, you can comfortably schedule your projects and offer timely delivery of projects to your customers. Further, while you might come across multiple roadblocks during conventional management of projects, the advanced process powered with automation, reduces the time on redundant tasks, reduces unnecessary roadblocks, and assist in completing projects before deadlines. Without a doubt, Apptivo’s Project Management software will create an integrated, productive environment for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How to generate Milestone Reports in the Projects App?
• How do I bill my customer based on milestone base rate?
• How do I update milestone’s duration?