Program Management: Defining Milestones

Question

How do you break up a complex project into milestones and prioritize these milestones?

Background

If you’ve worked on large complex projects that span multiple quarters or even years, then you know that being able to define incremental milestones to demonstrate progress is imperative to keep everyone on track and stakeholders happy.

Particularly for senior level roles, you’ll need to show that you have a record of delivering large scale projects with many stakeholders. Establishing smaller milestones along the way is a hallmark of a strong TPM.

Solution approach

We need to demonstrate that we can break down an ambitious project into smaller, achievable milestones in a logical manner. Similar to previous open-ended questions, we will use the following structured approach to answer this question:

• Start by providing a framework for breaking a project into milestones.

• Provide an example project where you applied this framework.

Sample answer

I’ll start by providing a framework for creating milestones.

Understand project deliverables

Complex projects will usually require a set of deliverables needed to accomplish the required objectives. The first step ...