Milestone Planning: A Participatory and Visual Approach

This paper introduces a participatory and visual approach to milestone planning called the Visual Milestone Planning (VMP) Method. VMP promotes involvement and commitment, through the reification of the planning artifacts and their direct manipulation by team members who collectively create the plan. Once a project scope is defined via a work breakdown structure and relevant milestones identified, a novel construct called the milestone planning matrix is used to systematically and visually capture dependencies among milestones and map WBS elements to the milestones they help realize. The milestones due dates are later determined by accommodating sticky notes representing the work to be done on a resource and time scaled milestone scheduling canvas. The method is applicable to traditional as well as to agile projects.