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Incorporating SMART Goals into Setting Project Milestones

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Incorporating SMART goals to reach project milestones is key to your teams productivity and motivation.

What does SMART goals stand for; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Project managers know the stress and importance of maintaining a project’s timeline. When the team encounters an unexpected delay they must coordinate their efforts into getting the project back on track. However, with the delicate timeline of a project this can become challenging to achieve. Delays usually lead to the project deadline being pushed back or the cancellation of the project as a whole. Meaningful project milestones must be put in place and the team’s incorporation of SMART goals should be used ensure efficiency. 

Project milestones are key elements to the project’s completion. They allow the team to visualize the progression of the project on a timeline. Milestones are used to divide the project into sections to avoid the overwhelming feeling of the project as an entirety. SMART goals can be used in synchrony with project milestones on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. Setting these goals as a team holds everyone accountable and to the same standard. These defined and attainable goals with specific criteria can work to improve the motivation of your team. 

Timeline and Goal Reinforcement

Using project milestones will ensure team motivation. The identification of each task completion as a milestone can take away from the momentum of the project. This is when SMART goals can become extremely valuable to project managers. Setting and reaching a weekly SMART goal gets your team one step closer to the completion of a project milestone while also providing a sense of progress. This gives your team the motivation to work towards the larger goal and allows them to see the importance of the milestone.

Visual Representation 

There is great importance to visibly scheduling project milestones on your team’s project calendar. These milestones must be presented with importance as their completion is essential to the project’s deadline. The team can set their weekly SMART goals in accordance to the project milestone deadlines. Therefore, using a project tracking software has great advantages for your team’s motivation and productivity. 

Responsibility

Project milestones are set with the understanding that they will be met on time. In the event of the team falling short meeting a milestone, it is crucial the project manager addresses it. This may include re-structuring and examining resources to improve functionality of the team. Reinforcement of a project milestone emphasizes the importance of meeting these goals as individuals on a team.

Liability to Error

This is an important concept to consider when setting milestones as a project manager. The project milestones need to be challenging enough to pose a risk of failure. This creates learning experiences for the team when re-configuring focus points and gives opportunity for SMART goal setting to get back on track. The failure may provide room for improvement within the final project. 

Importance of Properly Setting Project Milestones

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Every project manager knows the importance with keeping a project on track. When a project falls behind, the team needs to put in a great deal of effort to put ensure it is back on track because of the time-sensitive stages of a project; most of the time it leads to the project being delayed or cancelled entirely. Keeping employees motivated to complete a project can be difficult, the easiest way is with the use of project milestones.

Project milestones are important points on a project’s timeline that employees can look at for visual progression of the project. The thought behind making milestones is to categorize the parts of a project into digestible sections opposed to viewing the whole project at once; this should motivate your team to complete tasks on time. However, it is important to understand there is more to making project milestones than just setting them. Setting meaningful milestones will motivate your project team members more than setting frequent or unreachable milestones. Here are some things to consider when deciding your project milestones.

Tip #1: Frequency and Timing

As a project manager, you may be tempted to overuse milestones as a motivation tool to keep the team moving along the ladder to reach the surface of success. Don’t fall into the trap of labeling every task completion as a milestone. With more milestones, each one becomes less momentous, inadvertently taking away from the motivation of work. On the other hand, don’t adopt the other extreme approach by ignoring or not recognizing significant and relevant events as milestones. A good compromise is to consistently designate important deliverable’s as milestones.

Tip #2: Visibility

Milestones need to be placed prominently in the project’s schedule and tracked periodically. Make sure that your milestones have been incorporated into your project scheduling, calendar, or other project tracking software program. This promotes positive work productivity closer to the goal; similar to a runner getting closer to the end of a marathon.

Tip #3: Accountability

Milestones are commitments that must be met on time. If a milestone is missed, it needs to be addressed immediately by re-examining the resources to determine if they are properly matched to the objectives. This reinforces the meaning behind each milestone and the importance of the impact when achieving each milestone.

Tip #4: Fallibility

It may sound counter-intuitive, but you should select challenging milestones that carry a degree of risk for failure. Treat milestones as learning experiences and opportunities to make adjustments, so the final product can be flawless. People learn from mistakes; applying this philosophy to your projects will assist you to do your best work.

Understand project milestone management and reporting. Contact Entry Software for more information.

Why You Can’t Stick to your Schedule

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Sometimes, it seems like we can never follow our schedule and get all our tasks done on time. Our goals seem realistic until we’re an hour behind on one project while we should be working on another. Having a punctual and predictable schedule for the day is key to measuring and improving productivity. Here are a few reasons you end up falling behind, and some quick fixes to make your schedule more accurate.

You Don’t Leave Enough Time for Breaks

Very few people are able to spend an entire day working without taking any breaks. If you are one of these people, feel free to schedule your day without any downtime between tasks. However, if you’re like most of us, plan for a few minutes before and after each schedule entry to recalibrate and prepare. Stand up and stretch or take a short break and play an instrument or listen to your favourite music.

Your Goals are too Broad

To make the most accurate schedule, break each broad goal into as many small tasks as possible. Not only will this improve your schedule’s accuracy, but it will also help you to stay focused on the specific task at hand and improve your productivity.

You Assume your Day Won’t come with Distractions

Along with each day could come traffic jams, emergencies, late alarm clocks, late buses, or so much more. Even if you’re sure you’ll get everything done on time, accidents could happen and you could fail to reach your goals for the day. When creating your schedule, remember to leave some room to account for various unexpected delays.

You Overestimate Your Productivity

In a perfect world, productivity could be estimated by tasks divided by time. However, we can’t always tell the speed at which we will complete the day’s duties. Be honest with yourself when making your day’s schedule, and don’t overestimate your ability to work.

Your Workspace Isn’t Organized Enough

If time is money, then minutes wasted looking for a pen, paper, or any other materials you need to accomplish a task is comparable to setting a pile of cash on fire. To shave a few minutes off of each project, make sure you know where you keep all of your materials and avoid relying on your co-workers to lend you anything. While you’re at it, organize your desk to minimize distractions and lost documents.

You Lose Track of Time

It happens to everyone; conversations last too long, twenty-minute business meetings last an hour or a desk organization becomes an intensive cleaning. Plenty of seemingly small tasks can last much longer than intended and eat into our day. When scheduling for a busy day, try to eliminate small tasks that could take too much time. If they’re absolutely necessary, be sure to get to the point as soon as possible and don’t be afraid to cut a task short when there are more important things to attend to.

You Don’t have a Sufficient Scheduling Software

Written schedules have been a handy office tool for decades, but online schedules are the best way to optimize your productivity, save time, and minimize risk. Applications like Entry and Google Calendar offer significant features that will improve your ability to follow your schedule to the minute, such as notifications, cross-device compatibility, integration with TeamHeadquarters, and shared calendars.

We’ll never be able to predict exactly how our day will go, but for every time we miss one of our goals for the day, there is a way you could have prevented it from happening. Use the tips above and enjoy a much more accurate scheduling experience.