Jan 14, 2010
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Using Milestones and Sub-Tasks to Improve Communication
Milestones and sub-tasks are a powerful tool-set to improve communication on projects. When used together in a project schedule you can consolidate the informational needs of the client, project manager and team without having to use multiple project management systems or spreadsheets. It allows the schedule to be a single point of truth, as it were, and single reference point for project communications.
Here’s why it works.
People involved in a project have different informational goals.
- The client wants to know when things will be done and how they are progressing.
- The team wants to know the specific tasks they have to do.
- The project manager wants to coordinate the work, meet deadlines, manage resources, spot problems and improve processes.
Without a reference point, each person has trouble communicating. The client demands to know what’s going on. The team explains it in terms of the specific tasks. The project manager tries to translate between the two, or complicates matters but bringing out a Gantt chart, dependencies, a critical path or other project manager specific tools. The end result is frustration (or an exhausted project manager).
Here’s How to Do It.
You can avoid all this frustration and improve communications by creating a schedule using milestones and sub-tasks. The milestones are the major deliverables or key points for the client. They are what the client wants out of the project and places they need to be directly involved.
For the team, think of Milestones as parent-tasks and create sub-tasks underneath them. The sub-tasks are the specific, detailed, tasks that the team needs to do to get the project done.
When speaking to the client use the rolled-up version of the schedule showing the milestones only.
When speaking with the team use the drill-down version of the schedule showing all the sub-tasks.
This schedule then becomes the single point of truth, or reference, for all communication on the project. It has all the details needed for the team and a rolled-up view for clients. The project manager can use it manage the project and facilitate communication without double-entry of data into other systems.
When something changes on the project you can use this schedule to show how the change impacts the milestones (for the client) or the sub-tasks (for the team).
Taking it Further
Here are a few ways to use sub-tasks to create even more specific information that can improve communication on projects.
- If your project management software has the capability, you can sort the sub-tasks by each team member or by due date to provide specific to-do lists for each person.
- Using the same capabilities, you can create custom lists for your clients of all upcoming milestones in the next month across all projects.
- Depending on the number of people involved, you can use multiple levels of sub-tasks (e.g. 6.1.2) to further categorize project information for different teams or departments that may be involved.
- The multiple level of sub-tasks can then be rolled-up, as needed, for department meetings or meetings of team leaders.
