Criteria 2 of 9: Do you have too many Milestones?

Too many cooks spoiling the broth? There should only be 3-7 major milestones in your schedule. More than that and it tends to spoil your schedule

Philosophy of Less is More

On projects where I play a supporting role, the second thing I look for in a schedule is how many milestones it contains. Most projects I've been on have typically around 200-400 line items in the schedule (one day, I'll blog about projects I've been on with over 500 line items and why that's a bad idea and how that should be delegated).

I recently received a schedule from a vendor that had over 20 milestones!

It's obviously fine to have minor milestones within different phases of the SDLC (Software Development Life-Cycle). For example, to have a milestone for starting requirements gathering and another for baselining requirements in the envision phase of SDLC. And even then, those minor milestones are there only IF someone in the cross-functional team really needs it.

But at least color-code or have some sort of marker separating the minor milestones from the major milestones. And on my projects, even the muli-million dollar projects, have only had five to seven major milestones. There may have been times when I've ended up with eight milestones but I normally max out at seven milestones.

The magic number: Seven
The same reason we have seven-digit phone numbers is the same reason we stop at seven milestones: the short-term capacity for the average person is seven digits, plus or minus two. There's a fascinating article about the 1950s research about why our working memory can only hold seven digits (here). Perhaps that's why seven constantly comes up in history: seven deadly sins, seven wonders of the world, Shakespeare's seven ages of man, Harry Potter's seven horcruxes?

From a Project Management perspective, the major milestones are typically conveyed to management & senior management. And with the volume of information they need to deal with, looking at 20+ milestones is definitely not helpful in identifying what's important. But with 5-7 milestones, the task becomes much easier.

For example, the table below is an example of milestones I send out in my weekly emails after status calls with the project team. From management's perspective, they can see the major phases that will slip but which doesn't impact launch. This whole table is small enough, with only seven milestones, that it'll fit into management's working memory.

Phase Release Requested Forecast 1 Initiate 9/1 8/31 2 Envision 10/31 10/31 3 Design 11/5 11/5 4 Develop 11/10 11/16 5 Test 12/1 12/9 6 Launch 1/11 1/11 7 Close-out 2/1 2/1

Bottom line: Make sure your projects contain a maximum of seven milestones