Manage project milestones Define the key milestones in a project and celebrate them with your team

Why use Mural for tracking project milestones?

Remember SMART goals from grade school? They’re still as relevant as ever. It’s important to set achievable goals throughout the life of any project‌ — ‌identifying and tracking project management milestones can give your team a north star and keep them motivated to keep crushing goals. Some of the benefits of tracking milestones with Mural are:

• Monitoring progress: When you reach smaller goals within a project, you’re able to get a sense of the pace of the project‌ — ‌and where you may need to adjust deadlines.
  
  
• Motivating your team: Sometimes it’s hard to get swallowed up in a project and not see tangible progress. Tracking milestones helps your team see how far they’ve come. Progress is addicting‌ — ‌when you’ve achieved some, you want to keep going!
  
  
• Improving communication: When your team is striving for the same milestone, it gives team members, stakeholders, and project managers more visibility and encourages communication and engagement.
  
  
• Identifying bottlenecks. Tracking milestones will give you a good idea of why you may not be meeting your goals, particularly which tasks (or‌ — ‌let’s be honest‌ — ‌people) are halting the project’s progress.
  
  
• Allocating resources. Project milestones naturally break up your project into neat phases‌ — ‌phases which may require more or fewer resources, such as personnel, budget, or time.
  
  
• Planning for future projects. Every time you complete a milestone, you get important data you can use to structure similar future projects‌ — ‌how long it takes, who needs to be involved, how much budget is required, and so on. 

Benefits of using Mural for creating a milestone timeline 

Hitting milestones is exciting‌ — ‌a project milestone timeline with personality will inspire even more enthusiasm! Mural isn’t just a place to create a visually appealing project milestone timeline‌ — ‌you can infuse it with fun and functional elements to help your team find joy in the journey. 

• Diagram your project milestone timeline with templates. Not sure where to get started with your milestone timeline? Good news‌ — ‌we did the hard part for you. Choose from one of our hundreds of charts, calendars, or diagram templates and customize to fit your team’s preferences. 
• Share your timeline with relevant team members and stakeholders. Mural makes collaborative project management easy. Simple sharing and flexible permissions means you can ensure the right people have eyes on your milestone timeline at the right time. Choose who has revision powers and give instant access. 
• Easily update and expand. Murals are living documents‌ — ‌they’re made to be updated! As you add milestones or update your project info, you can infinitely edit or resize your milestone timeline without creating a formatting nightmare.
• Add sticky notes for progress updates. Team members can quickly share individual progress milestones or call out special considerations with sticky notes. 
• Celebrate in style. When your team hits a key milestone, you can share excitement and pride by adding customized gifs, or images right into the Mural!  

Learn more about Mural’s visual collaboration features and how they can help you make a stellar milestone timeline. 

How to tackle roadblocks in project management milestones with Mural

Milestone tracking comes with challenges. Boost collaboration and alignment with Mural to help tackle some of these roadblocks: 

• Unrealistic deadlines: Putting your team in a time crunch with unrealistic deadlines not only negatively affects morale, it can actually do the opposite and make your project drag on. Slow and steady wins the race! When you create milestones in project management with Mural, you can help your teams manage their time and see where you may need to adjust deadlines. 
• Lack of clear goals: It sounds obvious, but to meet your milestones, you have to know what they are. 37% of projects fail due to the lack of defined project objectives (Source: PMI). Setting goals collaboratively with Mural can give cross-functional teams and individuals a better idea of what their objectives are and how to meet them. Tip: Start from this OKR planning template‌ — ‌it’s great for project goals too! 
• Unforeseen dependencies: It’s easy to put the cart before the horse when you’re eager to see a project through, but some tasks rely on others to be completed before you can move on. Diagramming your project with Mural gives you a mile-high view of which tasks and teams affect others and how you can eliminate bottlenecks. A swimlane diagram can be immensely helpful to see where and how the baton gets passed! 
• Lack of flexibility: Stuff happens. It’s important to be flexible with your milestone timeline and keep an open mind about which milestones can be adjusted‌ — ‌or even eliminated. Mural is designed to help you embrace adaptive project methodology like Scrum so you can roll with the punches when your team starts to stray from your milestone timeline.
• Lack of resources: 27% of projects usually run over budget (Source: PMI). If you burn through all your resources reaching your first few milestones, the well may run dry before you make it to the next one. Mural can help you allocate resources appropriately with increased visibility and alignment from stakeholders (and purse-holders).

Milestones in project management: Best practices to stay on track

Track, hit, and celebrate your project milestones without a hitch by following these best practices‌ — ‌boosted by Mural’s visual collaboration features.

• Set SMART goals: Define what makes a good milestone. Is it specific? Measurable? Achievable? Realistic? Time-bound? If you check all these boxes, it’s probably a great milestone to strive for! Milestones should ideally be nailed down during the project planning phase of project management before kickoff, and adjusted according to team input. 
• Break down milestones into subtasks: Identify which tasks need to be completed to reach a project management milestone, which teams are involved, or any dependencies that may affect prioritization. Use Mural’s priority bullseye template to rank the importance and urgency of tasks within each milestone. 
• Increase visibility and encourage collaboration: Mural encourages everyone to be involved in milestone tracking. With flexible sharing, commenting, voting, and more, you’ll receive instant input from all relevant team members and stakeholders. 
• Schedule regular check-ins: Meet with team members at regular checkpoints to assess progress toward milestones and, if necessary, adjust deadlines. Take advantage of Mural’s team well-being check-in template to see how your team is doing mid-sprint and if you need to shuffle around some of the workload. Check in when a project is complete as well‌ — ‌only 23% of organizations reported that they’re always in agreement when a project is complete (Source: Geneca)!
• Be adaptable. It’s rare to make it to a milestone without some bumps in the road. Leave some breathing room during each phase of the project in case the scope changes, resources are reallocated, or deadlines need to be shifted. When you track milestones in Mural, it’s easy to edit, add, or remove elements from your project milestone timeline when items inevitably shift midflight. ‍
• Celebrate! Take some time after each milestone to reflect and congratulate your team on a job well done. With Mural, you can insert images and GIFS directly into your milestone tracker to add some levity and personality to milestone tracking. A well-placed meme can do wonders for morale.