Milestone Planning

---
name: milestone-planning
description: Plan milestones around meaningful integrated outcomes, dependencies, acceptance evidence, and decision points instead of arbitrary calendar checkpoints.
---
# Milestone Planning

Use when a project needs a delivery sequence that communicates when meaningful capability or readiness will exist.

## Procedure
1. Start from the final outcome and identify the few intermediate states that materially reduce uncertainty, enable downstream work, or create usable value.
2. Define each milestone by its completed outcome and acceptance evidence, not a percentage or list of activities.
3. Map hard dependencies, critical approvals, environments, vendors, and integration points required to reach each milestone.
4. Estimate dates or ranges from known work, capacity, dependency timing, and uncertainty; state assumptions rather than hiding them inside a single date.
5. Preserve parallel work where dependencies allow it and avoid milestones that serialize independent specialists unnecessarily.
6. Identify the decision or review gates associated with high-risk transitions.
7. Track scope changes against milestone acceptance criteria and update downstream commitments when the underlying outcome changes.
8. Close a milestone only when the integrated acceptance evidence exists.

## Decision rules
- “Development complete” is weak unless it defines what integrated behavior is actually ready.
- Milestones should reveal meaningful progress and risk reduction.
- Dates are commitments only when the required assumptions and authority support them.
- Do not confuse individual task completion with integrated milestone readiness.

## Quality gate
The plan is credible when milestones represent observable outcomes, dependencies and decision gates are explicit, timing assumptions are visible, parallelism is preserved where possible, and closure requires evidence rather than optimistic status.