Milestones not Millstones

Setting goals and hitting them. Important. But, more critical, is building momentum and moving forward, making progress. Milestones are goals that mark significant events within a project. These figurative milestones allow a team to gauge their progress toward ultimate project completion just as the literal milestones allow travelers to judge physical progress on a journey. Milestones are a tool for decomposing a large goal into smaller, more manageable units. They provide a guidance that allow teams to measure and celebrate progress.

A millstone is a heavy stone weight that is used to grind things into dust. In projects, a milestone becomes a millstone when it fails to generate healthy tension and instead becomes a source of anxiety and unproductive stress. Millstones create mental barriers to progress and establish negative patterns of thought and behavior. They push teams back rather than pull teams forward.

Managing a project is about setting-up challenging, but achievable milestones. Failure to reach a milestone should be viewed as an opportunity to improve the process, to recognize and remove impediments, and to reconsider potentially erroneous assumptions. Sometime, however, milestones become millstones—they may drag behind a project team and impede progress. When your goals become demotivating, they must be realigned, redesigned, or simply purged.