What a Difference a Day Makes

 

You ask one of the senior programmers working on your absolutely bottom-line, make-or-break project: "Hi Jim, how are your tasks progressing along?"

"Well, things seem to be working out really fine. We hit our pre-release milestone two weeks back, and we're on track to meet the critical final production milestone that's due in five weeks."

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Four weeks later, still glowing in the apparent success of your milestone successes, you happen to meet Jim by the water cooler: "So, the final milestone is due in a week. From the progress of our milestones, we should be on time and on target, right?"

"Uh, I think we may have an itsy-bitsy problem..." explains Jim.

Seems Jim thought that task number 67 would have only taken a week to complete, but it's actually taken him two weeks. He must have overlooked something along the way, he's two weeks late and because of the modifications he had to make to the transactions module, he has to revisit the code he did in the other components. Everyone is looking at another month of work.

The bottom line: The damage has been done and you have to recover on your feet. But it doesn't always have to be like this.

When you establish traditional (or what we'll call "major") milestones in a project, you're setting the strategic objectives that you want to achieve. A good set of milestones will give you a clear sense of direction, help prioritize tasks and measure progress (so goes the conventional wisdom). But saying that you have to go through strategy, design and coding milestones to get to the final release doesn't exactly give you a very clear idea of what you have to do, especially when these major milestones are typically months apart. What exactly do you have to do to get from the strategy milestone to the design milestone? Let's say you're planning to climb a mountain peak this weekend. Let's also say that six miles and about four hours of trekking separates you from your starting point and the peak. You've identified about four major landmarks that will guide you to your final destination. But your next question would be: "How do I get from one landmark to the next?"

This is where micro-milestones can come in handy. First introduced by Steve McConnell in the best-selling book Rapid Development, micro-milestones--or miniature milestones, as McConnell calls them--can provide you with a very granular approach to tracking and controlling your project. In the micro-milestones approach, you and your team members agree on a schedule of highly detailed milestones that your team members have to meet on a daily--or almost daily--basis. Going back to our mountain climbing scenario above, you can think of micro-milestones as the rivers, buildings and trees that help guide you to each of your major landmarks.

The fundamental reasoning behind micro-milestones is that if you have daily feedback on the actual progress of your projects, you'll be able to deal with any roadblocks or obstacles that threaten your project's schedule, before they have a chance to build up critical mass and harm the health of your project. As Fred Brooks says in The Mythical Man Month: "How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time." If you turn Brooks' insight around on its head, by verifying and validating your progress against your schedule plan every single day, it's pretty hard for your project to spin out of control, thus reducing the risk of schedule slippages.

Here are some rules to keep in mind if you want to use the micro-milestones approach in your next project:

Plan your micro-milestones along the way
It's often difficult to plan all your micro-milestones in advance. You may be able to see the major landmarks when you begin your trek, but you surely can't see all the smaller landmarks in between. Map out your route to each major milestone using the smaller landmarks you can see from where you're currently standing. Then when you get to the next major milestone, identify the next set of micro-milestones that will take you to where you want to go. Repeat until you hit your objective.

Give ownership of micro-milestones to your team members
To many people, "micro-milestones" sounds a lot like "micro-management." Actually it is micro-management, but in the good sense. Micro-management becomes bad when you look over people's shoulders and tell them how to do their jobs. Micro-management becomes good when you empower your people to define the tasks that go into the list of micro-milestones that keeps your project flowing through the major milestones. Tasking your people to work in this manner is hard and time consuming upfront, but it will pay off in the long run. Your people are forced to think hard about what they have to do on a daily basis and define their tasks more clearly.

Include every task that has to be done to reach your objectives
To be really effective, your list of micro-milestones has to contain every task needed to release your product and close your project. If you have to do a particular task to complete the project, it should be on the micro-milestones list. It might seem like a lot of work to do as a project manager, but remember that while you have to do a lot of things right to complete a project successfully, you will have to do just one thing wrong to screw things up. Miss a milestone here, miss a task there, and before you know it, all these small things add up to one really big bad finish.

Keep the milestones micro
One of the best ways to keep your project on track is to break large and vague tasks into smaller ones. In other words, turn the abstract into the concrete by breaking complex tasks into smaller and simpler ones. When you ask your people to estimate their tasks, they will tend to focus on the tasks they know best and try to wing it with the ones they understand least. But those poorly understood tasks often take up the most time and pose the most risk to your schedule. If you keep your milestones small and achievable in at least one or two days, you prevent your people from hiding unforeseen work behind the facade of time. They will have no choice but to break down their task into more detail and really think about what they have to do. When you only have a vague idea of what you have to do, a week seems like forever; but that misguided optimism can turn what was supposed to be a one-week job into three weeks of 18-hour shifts just to hand off the deliverable to the next person in the chain of dependency.

Micro-milestones should be binary
That is, either they're completed or they're not. Select milestones that can be measured in an unequivocal way. A good micro-milestone would be "complete the transaction processing module by Tuesday." This is better: "You either finish the module by Tuesday or you don't." It's clear and can be measured it in a binary way; it's either done or it's not. When you start allowing your people to report that tasks are 95 percent done, micro-milestones begin to lose their ability to let you track project progress clearly and accurately.

Measure your progress and recalibrate missed milestones
Let's face it: You're going to miss a couple of milestones in your project. It's a fact of life with projects and there's not much you can do about it. One of the advantages in using micro-milestones is that you will be getting real-time feedback on any slippages since you are tracking progress on virtually a daily basis. With traditional milestones spaced weeks or months apart, you often will only get warning about slippages just when it may be too late to change things easily. If you find out that you're starting to miss your daily targets frequently, you should take corrective action by either recalibrating and extending your schedule to account for the slippages, or try to get back on track with your original schedule by cutting features and functionality, or improving the efficiency of your team members.

Using micro-milestones requires a heavy commitment in time and effort from project managers and team members, but managing your milestones daily can help keep your projects on the right track and deliver on time and on target. Or you can always go back to doing what your competitors are doing: delivering their projects late, one day at a time.

Geoff is a digital content strategist based in Italy. With more than five years experience in e-business consulting, project management and web development, Geoff helps clients navigate the maze of digital content development by defining, articulating, managing and implementing content and editorial strategies. He has previously worked as a project manager and web developer for IconMedialab and Collective Wisdom. He can be reached at [email protected].