PIC S 2012 Milestone Best Practices Guide
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Performance
Improvement
Council
MILESTONES GUIDE
Best Practices and What Not to Do
2012 Draft
Milestones in Performance Management
•Milestones are an important part of the goal implementation
process
•Agencies can use milestones to track progress towards goal
achievement on a quarterly basis
•Milestones are especially helpful for goals with only annual
measures and targets
•Milestones can be qualitative or quantitative in nature
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Considerations for Milestone Setting
Project Management – critical path milestones
•Key milestones driving project schedule
Other types of milestones
•Finding and learning what works
•Analyzing best practices to understand how to improve performance of goals
•Testing the replication of best practices
•Evaluations and studies
•Spreading and scaling success
•Coordination across organizations
•Both within components of the agencies and cross-agency
•Improving ability to measure progress
•Developing milestones that depict key actions to advance progress where it is otherwise
difficult to develop quantitative indicators
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Characteristics of Milestones
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GOOD Characteristics
Milestones should be concise and easy to
understand
Milestones should articulate concrete
actions the agency plans to take that
quarter that connect to an achievement of
a strategy and/or outcome (e.g. inclusion
of an “in order to…” statement)
Milestones should be specific, measurable,
actionable, results-oriented and time-
bound
Milestones should be jargon-free
Great milestones will clearly articulate the
projected impact of the anticipated action
BAD Characteristics
Progress updates should not be milestones
A meeting with no definition of purpose or
the planned outcome should not be a
milestone
If an agency is "continuing to do [insert
activity]", that is not a milestone
Training, without any explanation as to the
target audience, purpose or expected
result, is a bad milestone
General stakeholder outreach, without any
planned targeting, strategy or purpose, is a
bad milestone
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Examples of Good Milestones
Project Management – critical path milestones
•Award contract to begin training services to support implementation of revised Job Development
Program at all CONUS and OCONUS training locations
Process
•Implement Homeless Patient Aligned Care Teams (H-PACT) at 32 sites with the goal of eliminating
barriers to quality healthcare and improving housing outcomes for Veterans who are homeless or at
imminent risk of homelessness
IT
•Complete the FY2011 release and evaluation of iClaim, incorporating a language option for those who
preferred language is Spanish, as well as accepting applications from eligible individuals who live in
foreign countries
Stakeholders
•Conduct targeted marketing to representative payees of working SSI recipients, to increase the use of the
SSI Telephone Wage Reporting System
Training
•Conduct hurricane disaster assistance training for 300 staff in Region 4 in order to equip them with the
latest tools leading to a faster response time
Reports
•Publish X Report which contains the combined information from all states and territories that will
communicate accomplishments from the past year as well as areas for improvement to follow up on
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Note: all the above milestones should be time-bound
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Bad Milestones – The “What Nots”
Process
•Continue to make progress on this goal as applications are received
Meeting
•Hold a meeting with senior leadership
IT
•Plan to launch next phase of IT roll-out
Stakeholders
•Perform outreach to stakeholder groups
Progress
•Perform status check and/or achieve the goal
Training
•Conduct awareness training
Reports
•Publish quarterly report on [insert topic]
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