May 6, 2011
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Why Start Dates Matter on Milestones
Start dates tell your team members when things should begin.
It sounds obvious, but many teams manage by due date alone. It is even embedded into some project management software -due date only, no start date.
If a team member only has a due date, they are always playing catch-up. Project managers will only know when the milestone is late. Communication becomes all about getting status updates. People will perpetually be scrambling to keep up with what’s on their plate.
What’s more, planning becomes a matter of staggering milestones based instead of making strategic and informed decisions. Prioritizing milestones and juggling fires becomes the main mode of operation. Discussion is limited to “what are you working on? how is it going? can you squeeze one more thing in?”
Adding in a start date, along with an end date, gives people a sense of how long the milestone should take. It also gives them a sense of how long they have to complete it, compared to other milestones on their plate.
This allows you to plan work, strategically. It also allows you compare your estimates of how long you thought a milestone would take against how long it actually did take. You can then change that the next time somebody needs to do the same thing. You and the organization can learn from past experience.
Here’s another reason to use start dates. It impacts your bottom line. Since many companies bill clients based on the duration of a task, I’ve seen client’s double their revenue and increase profitability by starting to keep track of start and end dates.
Lovely post, it reminds me of the critical chain approach to project management. This sees the project critical items as a baton to be passed to the next person in the chain as quickly as possible. When you run a relay race you don’t wait until the due time before you start to run, you get going as soon as you can. This worked really well with and R&D team I was once managing.
I couldn’t agree more with your blog post Mark, great work! We always build in start dates with clients on their processes as this is core to understanding and reporting on areas that can cause unnecessary wastage on a project in addition to letting everyone know when they should be starting and finishing. It keeps thing simple and straightforward.