Dominique was 60 days into onboarding into a new job and had asked for progress updates from her direct reports. She was told things were going fine. While she hoped that was right, she had no data. No one had shown her anything to indicate they were making the progress she expected. But no one had been asked to do that. The only accountabilities were final deliverables. There were no interim deliverables – milestones.
I’m not going to go into the mechanics of milestones here. There’s a whole chapter on them in The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan. This note is designed to reinforce the advisability of using them as a way to improve communication and executional excellence.
Without milestones, all you can do is hope things are on track. With them in place, you can see things happen along the way and intervene as appropriate. With the best milestone management system in place the team can anticipate future issues and work together to refocus resources on the most important things. This is much more productive than scrambling after an unexpected miss.
