Being put in charge of a project is a wonderful position of trust and faith. It is your responsibility to get the job done, utilise the resources and stick to the budget. But where do you start? It may be a mammoth task with an immense amount of work to do and everyone is looking at you for direction. Do not panic! The first thing you need to do is to begin to dissect the project into tasks, both large and small and identify the milestones (this and much more can be learnt in one of our leadership development courses London). Do not underestimate the need for milestones, as these will be morale boosting sections to a project.

So what is a milestone and how is it different from a task? If you were to say, 'right, I am going to buy a house by this time next year,' then you are setting yourself a goal that would count as a milestone. A milestone is an objective or major event that often requires many smaller tasks to be completed before it can be deemed complete. It is a large outcome that encompasses all the work that went into it. Tasks would be the smaller, though no less important things that you completed in order to make that milestone happen. In this example you would need to get a job, open a bank account, save a deposit, get a mortgage, find a house and many other things before you can purchase your house. These are all tasks that make up your to do list which must be finished before you complete the final act of buying the house and reaching the milestone which is the significant larger goal. Milestones do not always need to have a date associated with them.

One important aspect of a milestone versus a task is that milestones are what the management and client really want to hear about. During a project, it may be that there are three hundred small and large tasks that are completed to produce the final product. If for example you are creating a piece of client software, there will be many coding tasks for the developers to complete. There may also be various data imports and exports and quite technical task to be completed. While you as a manager or team member will look into these tasks in detail, a client will have little interest in such things. They will be interested in the final product or the various larger milestones such as completion of the first version of the product for testing.

In order to identify tasks and milestones, it is necessary to begin with the simple list. If you are in charge of a team working on a project together then include them in a brainstorming session to identify tasks as well as categories of tasks. Look at the main goal and consider what things must be achieved first. There may be many levels to such tasks. For example, if you are creating a new piece of software then one category might be market research. Market research would contain many tasks such as searching for suitable market research company, complete the market research, analyse the findings and apply the results to the development requirements. Task identification is therefore about looking in detail at all the things that need to be completed before a worthwhile outcome can be seen. A task is a component of work that can be assigned to a person to complete