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Do you set Milestones?

I’m contractually obliged to complete my current project by June 1st. So how can I make sure that I do that? By setting Milestones of course. If I was to just work on my project and hope that it will be ready in time one of three things could happen:

1) I actually finish it early because I’m an incredibly hard worker and/or the deadline was “easy”
2) Miraculously I finish bang on time with no loose ends.
3) I overrun by anywhere from a small to very large amount.

I have found option 3 to be the most common in development with myself in the past and with other developers that I’ve hired or been in contact with.

Who set the deadline?

One important thing to realise with deadlines is who set it. If it’s some date that a manager pulled out of a hat for you, you could be in trouble…If it’s a date that you set yourself then how did you arrive at that date? Did you just say “Yeah June sounds good, I’ll do it by then” or did you make a comprehensive plan overviewing all areas of the project and then assign time estimates (this takes experience by the way) to each part and then add on some contingency time before arriving at a viable date? Hopefully it was the second one. If you have been handed a date on plate by a third party (could even be a client) then make a plan, assign estimates and work out if you can complete the project on time. If not, then speak to them and ask what they want to remove from the project or if they want to change the date – it’s no use asking for an “extension”, school-project-style, the day before the project is due to be delivered (or worse still, not even contacting them and just being late).

Milestones

OK so you’ve got a plan and a viable date, now how do you make sure that you finish on time? Sure, you could just work on the project a set amount of hours each day, dealing with problems as they arise and adding little extras here and there and then … oops you’ve missed the deadline. Why? Because all the unforseen problems and additional extras gradually padded the project out by weeks until you missed the deadline by a mile.

This is where Milestones come in. You look at your plan and use your time estimates to work out what you should have completed by Friday at the end of the first week. Then you repeat for all the other weeks in the project timescale. Then you start programming and if you haven’t hit your milestone by the Friday then you work all weekend until you have hit your milestone. It’s no use thinking that you’ll catch up later when some piece of work takes less time that you thought because it *never* happens (OK I’ll concede that if you are lucky, it *sometimes* happens).

Avoiding padding

So OK, how can you avoid working at the weekend every week as that’s not particularly desirable? Well you need to put the most effort in at the start of the week so that you finish on time or even early! If you finish early, then what? Well you could get a head start on the next piece of work or you could go back over the last week’s work and add some more polish – after all, if you are making a game, polish sells! Here’s a key point, if you get a bright idea halfway through the week don’t start to implement it immediately or you’ll fall behind. Make a note of all such “polish” ideas and see if there is time to put them in at the *end* of the week. Or, at the end of the project, if you have any time left (haha), you may be able to put some more polish items in then or you may be able to talk to the manager/customer and see if they even want the polish items – because sometimes they won’t as they just want the project delivered on time.

Summary

So to summarise:

1) Before making a commitment to a date, make an overview plan detailing each section of the project and attach time estimates to it. Then you know if the date is viable.
2) Set milestones based on your plan and time estimates.
3) Work hard at the start of the week (or better still, *all* week long) and make sure that you meet your milestone.
4) If you finish early, add some extra polish or get a head start on next week’s work.
5) If you miss the milestone, catch up right now, you cannot afford to let the lateness compound.
6) Note down polish items, ideas etc throughout the project and see if there is time to do them at the end or talk to the manager/customer and see if they even want them!

I hope that this article helps you with future projects. If you follow the techniques above (or a suitable variation of them), you’ll be amazed at how productive you can be in terms of delivering finished projects on time. If anyone disagrees with any points or has any other useful feedback or systems of your own, then please let me know! 🙂

One Response to “Do you set Milestones?”

  1. GameProducer.Net » Carnival of Game Production - Fourth Edition Says:

    […] has written a detailed article titled Do you set milestones? The article contains several tips on how to benefit from setting […]