Maintaining Milestones for Projects

WHAT ?

Gitlab has a Milestone feature using which we group issues and set due dates to them. Because we wish to ship something every week/fortnight we would group related issues under a milestone. The milestone title would mention

• 1 or more epics where progress is happening. This could also be Objective or Goal that we are meeting in the milestone
• Week numbers when the progress is expected to happen.
• Health Indicator of the milestone

The milestone needs to be ready on Monday every week.

WHY ?

The milestones not only serve as TODO list for team members for entire week(s), but serve as a health indicator of the project as well. The health indicator helps the team and other stakeholders especially clients, realize the value that has been delivered over the week.

HOW ?

Every Milestone should have 3 parts. Title, Description and Health Indicators

Title

The title of the Milestone would be 'Epic1/Objective1 - Week X - Y/Z', where:

• Epic1 or Objective1 could be 2-6 worded phrase that as per Smart Criteria outlines the Specific and Measurable amount of work that would be covered in milestone
• X is the week number of the year
• Y is the no. of Project Health Signals that have received a positive/green review
• Z is the no. of Project Health Signals that have been reviewed

The title of the Milestone should be Specific. Measurable = Distinguishable

Description

The description should clearly point out what we promised to the stakeholder at the end of the milestone.

For eg:

Promise to Client : Milestone description :

Health Indicators

So what are these Project Health Signals, they are as follows:

These signals are to be set at the start of the Week:

• Enough Work: There are enough tasks in the project for the week, and all the tasks are listed in the milestone, this Signal turns green.
• Enough People: If there enough people required to pull off the work in the Milestone for the week, this also becomes green.

These need to be set at the end of the Week:

• Team is Satisfied: Each team member will have his own signal, and will indicate weather he/she is satisfied with the work they have done for the week.
• Client is Satisfied: Each client will have a signal, and is turned green when the client has provided feedback for the work done in the week and is satisfied with the same.

An example of what the description of milestone look like:

• Resource allocation
  • Enough Work
  • Enough People
• Team members can appreciate progress
  • Jatin -
  • Mohit -
  • Ranadip -
  • Reuben -
• Manager can appreciate progress
  • Tushar
• Client can appreciate progress
  • Joel

Any additional notes from the client/retrospect for the week can also be left in the deception of the milestone.

A few examples on how the project health would be calculated:

• Say for example we have a project where we have enough work but no people, we can't go further from that and project health would be 0/1.
• If all team members are satisfied, and the manager has reviewed but is not satisfied, and the client is yet to review the health would be 2/3
• In the event where all team members, manager is satisfied, client has reviewed and is not satisfied the health would be 3/4
• Incase all the team, manager, and clients are satisfied the health indicator would read 4/4, and that is the goal of all our projects.