How To Plan Better Milestones For Long Projects

By Matt Doyle, VP and co-founder of Excel Builders, a truly unique custom home builder, creating homes that make every day easier.

Milestones are necessary when you want to turn a large project into smaller, achievable goals. You should put some thought into creating them because choosing the right milestones can increase client satisfaction and reduce stress and strain on your team.

My experience with long projects comes from my background in custom home construction. Many of our projects take months to complete, and my clients and my team rely on me to create effective milestones that guide the project forward.

When I build out milestones for my projects, I like to focus on making them feasible, measurable and meaningful.

Make Them Feasible

Feasibility is one of the most important factors to consider when you’re choosing milestones for long projects. Choosing a feasible milestone means choosing one that’s reasonably within the power of your team to achieve when they’re working their best. This may sound simple, but it can be truly hard to gauge without past experience.

You can expect a lot of problems if you aren’t careful to make your goals feasible. Missed deadlines are one of the most common problems. This can create a bad relationship with your clients and could even lead to losses for your company if the delays cause any issues with the contract.

Even if you can keep to barely feasible deadlines, it’s usually a bad experience for your team when they have to keep up with them. Poorly planned milestones mean your team will always be pushed to rush through no fault of their own. Rushing is likely to affect the quality of the work they deliver.

Make Them Measurable

When building milestones for large projects, it’s essential that you make them measurable. This means you need to make the milestones precise to the point that you (and the other parties involved) can always tell whether you’ve reached them or not.

To make this happen, it’s helpful to make sure that your milestones can be measured in numbers whenever it’s possible to do so.

Making your milestones measurable is important because it helps you deliver on expectations. When goals are fully measurable, you, your clients and your teams will all agree on what they mean. This is vital because misunderstandings about whether a goal has been reached can easily derail a project.

Make Them Meaningful

Milestones are most effective when they feel important to your clients and team members. You may find that there are some places to segment your project that are feasible and measurable, but not meaningful. You can spot this problem when your milestones just aren’t interesting enough to inspire you (or your team or clients).

Try to build milestones so that each one feels like the closing of an important chapter. You should have something worth celebrating and something that your client can celebrate, too.

Build Better Milestones With The Right Considerations

Creating better milestones can help turn a stressful project into a breezy one. Your clients and team members will both benefit if you focus on creating milestones that are feasible, measurable and meaningful. Making this happen doesn’t require a budget, but it does require some serious planning.