Project management: do interim milestones help work start earlier?
A schedule can be full of milestones while most of the work still happens shortly before delivery. The management question is specific: should interim deadlines be imposed, chosen by the team, or replaced by a single final deadline?
What the literature establishes
Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch (2002, Psychological Science) show, in experimental and educational settings, that people can use binding deadlines they set themselves to curb procrastination. However, they do not necessarily choose the most effective deadlines: in one experiment, externally imposed, evenly spaced interim deadlines produce better performance than freely chosen dates. These findings support the potential value of precommitment, not of every possible way of dividing up a schedule.
Elapsed time can change how a team works
Connie Gersick (1988, Academy of Management Journal) observes temporary teams whose working patterns do not develop linearly: a transition around the midpoint of the available time involves revising their approach. The time remaining thus appears capable of becoming a cue to question a previously sustained way of working. This observation concerns a collective dynamic; it does not demonstrate that adding a milestone causes that transition.
The premature conclusion
The tempting conclusion would be to multiply deadlines to generate more progress. Yet a milestone entered in a tool is not equivalent to a binding deadline with an expected output and known consequences. For a project manager, the issue is therefore less the number of dates than what they actually require the team to make available for examination. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these studies cannot settle
The tasks studied by Ariely and Wertenbroch do not reproduce the technical dependencies, regulatory approvals or scope changes of a complex project. Gersick's study is a field investigation of a small set of teams, not a trial comparing different milestone policies. These studies therefore establish neither a universal cadence nor an acceptable cost for interim deliveries.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within SHR's Project Management programme, a possible exercise in Lausanne would be to select a divisible deliverable: a medtech technical dossier, a research protocol at a higher education institution, an operational dossier for an international sports organisation or a feature for a Lake Geneva region scale-up. For an upcoming phase, agree on interim deadlines, each with an item that can be examined and an acceptance criterion defined in advance, then measure the proportion of those items available and meeting the criterion on the agreed date, alongside the time spent preparing and reviewing them. Comparing these measures with a comparable earlier phase without explicit interim deadlines would help document the arrangement's local value, without automatically attributing every difference to the milestones. To go further: explore the Project Management training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Project Management in Lausanne
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