“Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.” – Nelson Mandela Just as the original term ‘milestone’ denotes a marker indicating distance traveled, so milestones in project represent a task or activity completed so far. But they are actually far more useful and versatile than that. In this post, we define project milestones, and explore why they’re an essential part of the project management process.

Balancing all of a company’s various business needs can be difficult and often results in using a number of different solutions to get the job done. So often these days, a lot of software focuses on fulfilling one specific need, and doing it really well. While this is great in providing consumers with good quality services, it also results in complicated workflows that see users going between multiple products in order to complete a single project.

The last year and a half has really tested how well organisations in the UK—and around the world—are able to communicate goals and create clarity for their teams. Without strong goals to work towards together, teams flounder and can’t do their best work, especially considering the amount of sudden change and stress people have experienced.

What is PMO and what does it do? PMO is an acronym for Project Management Office. In any organization, PMO is a department responsible for improving project management by improving efficiencies. PMO creates and maintains documents, tracks progress, and offers education on matters about a project.

Project integration management is the coordination of each specific aspect of a large project. A project is more than just tasks, milestones, communications, and reports. Projects have a context; they aim to satisfy all requirements by balancing resources and fulfilling stakeholder’s expectations. In this way, Project Integration Management is the process of managing a project in its totality, including the tasks, milestones, communications, requirements, trade-offs, and resource decisions.

As the popular maxim goes, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Nowhere is this truer than in the creation of a project plan. And, as training organization PM4DEV explains, “a project can only be successful if the success criteria were defined from the start.” Without a plan, you can’t define or measure the scope of the project or its success.

Stratford Group is a leading management consulting firm based in Ottawa, Canada. Their goal is simple – help organizations and their leaders grow, improve and transform. As the President of Management Consulting, Colleen Kelley leads the business strategy and operations practice for Stratford Group.