Project Management

Milestones as a Measure of Success

Milestones are essential to any project manager to aid one in planning, to implement, and monitoring your project's progress.   Some milestones for any project phase include commencing and finishing phases, approval of projects, achieving project objectives and goals, creating required project deliverables, completing critical tasks, assembling a project team, and project kick-off meeting (Westland, 2021).  These milestones relate to any project irrespective of the industry.  One can measure the success of a project by monitoring the progress of a project or the schedule in real-time. You can determine how far you are from the completion of milestones by use of milestone charts.  With these charts, stakeholders can be reported on the project's progress about the plan. You can know whether you have reached the milestone or complete a task in time or within the set budget through status project reporting. If not, then changes can be made to put the tasks back on schedule.

Furthermore, milestones can be used for celebrating project achievements either when a milestone or a derivable has been achieved. Moreover, milestones can be used in Gantt charts to plan projects using ProjectManager (Westland, 2021). Through the software, tasks can be assigned to teams and tracked to ensure collaboration, enable dialogue and updates, and share files. Reporting is streamlined for stakeholders as progress can be shown in real-time.

Limitations of Milestones in Project Reporting

Milestones can have their limitations when it comes to project reporting. However, though primary tools for management reporting, milestones have no duration, unlike project tasks (Lock, 2017). Besides, the milestone approach does not fully establish relationships among activities (milestones). Listed in chronological sequence, not all essential interrelationships are demonstrated as milestones are not necessarily associated in a logical sequence. Moreover, the milestone chart does not permit calculating the impacts of slippages and adjustments as it only boosts their reporting.

Best Practices with Monitoring Project Quality

There some ways to monitor and control the quality is by creating a change request process. It is essential to adjust the request process to handle many challenges associated with project management, such as scope creep that often results in dissatisfied stakeholders, project overages, and unsuccessful projects (Lock, 2017).  Requests for scope change often come from functional team members and stakeholders. Hence, it is dangerous to let them approve the change request without engaging the project sponsors to ensure that these change requests are appraised, and a suitable course of action is taken.

Moreover, another project quality management best practice involves managing the plan, budget, schedule, and note warning signs. It is vital to regularly analyze the workload and progress to identify progress (Lock, 2017). This way, you will determine the projects ahead or before schedule and work on adjusting the plan. Thus, this can be done by noticing early warning signs such as depending on overtime to complete projects, identifying tasks that have already been done, minimizing, or skipping project completion steps.

A flowchart as a Quality Management Tool

A flowchart is one quality tool that can be employed in project administration.  It entails a graphical depiction of steps in a workflow (Lock, 2017). Therefore, it illustrates the actions of any procedure via graphic symbols (either rectangle, circles, diamonds for easy understanding and interpretation), which are linked to one another using paths that signify the workflow's direction. Flowcharts are very valuable in making corrections for any proves. Besides, they help eradicate the redundancy and unuseful work steps. Moreover, they are crucial in developing the project work statement.

Project Management

 

1. Milestones as a measure of success

• Milestones are essential to any project manager to aid one in planning, to implement, and monitoring your project's progress.
• Milestones can be used for celebrating project achievements either when a milestone or a derivable has been achieved.

2. Limitations of milestones in project reporting

• Milestones can have their limitations when it comes to project reporting.
• Listed in chronological sequence, not all essential interrelationships are demonstrated as milestones are not necessarily associated in a logical sequence.

3. Best practices with monitoring project quality

• There some ways to monitor and control the quality is by creating a change request process.
• It is essential to adjust the request process to handle many of the challenges associated with project management, such as scope creep that often results in dissatisfied stakeholders, project overages, and unsuccessful projects.
• Another project quality management best practice involves managing the plan, budget, schedule, and note warning signs.

4. A flowchart as a quality management tool

• A flowchart is one quality tool that can be employed in project administration. 
• It entails a graphical depiction of steps in a workflow.
• Flowcharts are very valuable in making corrections for any proves.

 

 

5. References

• Lock, D. (2017). The essentials of project management. Routledge.
• Westland, J. (2021). What Are Milestones in Project Management?.ProjectManager.com. Retrieved 23 September 2021, from https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/milestones-project-management.