KPI of the Day – Project Management: % Project milestones missed
Definition
Measures the percentage of milestones missed during the project, out of the total number of project milestones.
Purpose
To assess project adherence to the initial milestones schedule.
Recommendations
Measurement can refer to all project milestones or it can be made separately for milestones with different levels of importance. These types of turning points help provide actionable goalposts to manage within a project, as well as maintain an objective tracking of the project’s performance.
From a practical perspective, milestones could be any of the following: achieving a significant checkpoint in the project lifecycle; the production of one or more project deliverables; the progress against time and schedules set. In this respect, milestone planning can become a valid solution for reducing % Project milestones missed.
Project strategies, on the one hand, are generally an effective way of ensuring that project goals are attained and delivery outputs are maximized. In this context, project turning points act like control stages in the project, as well as a way for stakeholders to make sure that the project is heading in the right direction and is not impeded by delays.
The milestone plan, on the other hand, logically ties all turning points together, so as to drive and assess project performance.
Milestone achievement can be successfully executed by considering several recommendations, including the following:
- Making use of ‘status’ on each milestone, such as ‘started, met, or missed’;
- Considering actions that need to be taken to manage ‘missed’ and ‘about to be missed’ milestones;
- Connecting milestones to the big picture in order to avoid unrealistic goals.
Data collection can be achieved through project plan management reports and organizational databases documenting progress status. Moreover, as far as target-setting is concerned, remember that the lower the targets, the lower the impact on project schedule and budget.
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