Best Practices for Recording Project Milestones

Project managers are the memory of a project Stakeholders are busy. Priorities shift. Teams change. Months from now, decisions get forgotten, context fades, and what seemed obvious becomes unclear. That's where you, the project manager, create above-and-beyond value. You're not just tracking tasks. You're preserving the story (and details) of the project so the team and stakeholders don't lose their way. Here's how you can do it well: 👉 Document decisions immediately and share them regularly Don't rely on memory or casual notes. Capture who decided what, why, and when. Then share it out repeatedly for awareness and dependencies. 👉 Maintain a single source of truth Ideally in one specific place (repository). Centralize project notes, timelines, updates, RAID log, etc. Make it easy for anyone to find the info that they need. 👉 Summarize key learnings After milestones or sprints, create a brief recap. Highlight what worked, what didn't and lessons for the next phase. Share them with the team so they can be implemented. 👉 Connect past to present When new stakeholders join, onboard them with context. This prevents the team from wasting time revisiting old conversations. And gets your new team members off on a good foot. 👉 Keep things accessible and actionable Use clear language, bullet points, and visual aids. Make the history of the project easy to consume. This makes next steps palatable too (and usually quite obvious). Effective project managers don't just manage the work. They safeguard the memory of the project. So that it can be used to progress it every step of the way. 🤙

We overcomplicate project management. That's something I learned when working in-house. I spent a ton of time creating in-depth timelines, using PM software to break down milestones, and built threads for each step in the process. I thought I was creating "a source of truth." What I was actually creating was confusion. If stakeholders wanted to see the high level status of a project, they had to dive through multiple threads of Trello cards or Jira boards in order to see whether a project was on track or not. So, I simplified my process. I created a spreadsheet document for every campaign. This was our true source of truth. For every asset, they could see high-level status: Not Started, In Progress, In Review, Addressing Feedback, Finalizing, Complete, or Canceled. Then, they got a link to the latest WIP, high-level notes (what we needed feedback on, what we were addressing, when the next WIP was coming, etc). Finally, we showed an estimated date of completion. When the project was complete, it became an archive of all the finalized files. This process was all about reducing confusion. It condensed all the information our stakeholders truly cared about into one place. Sometimes less truly is more.

In CQV projects, what gets tracked gets done. But what gets tracked in five different places? That gets lost. In a recent project, the weekly updated PQ Schedule became the single source of truth. It didn’t just help us see progress - it helped us drive it. Here’s what that experience reinforced: ✅ Centralized tracking isn’t optional. Whether you use Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, or a shared master tracker - what matters is one unified view of progress, milestones, and risks. ✅ Define meaningful KPIs. Track what matters: ● Protocols drafted ● Executed and reviewed ● Approved and closed out ✅ Report regularly and visually. Your dashboard should answer three questions: 1️⃣ Where are we now? 2️⃣ What’s behind? 3️⃣ What’s next? Because in large-scale C&Q projects, decentralized tracking creates confusion, missed dependencies, and finger-pointing. One source of truth. One rhythm of reporting. That’s how you maintain momentum. 💬 What’s your go-to method for CQV progress tracking? #CQV #Validation #ProjectManagement #GMPCompliance #Smartsheet #MicrosoftProject #ExecutionExcellence #LifeSciences #Ellab #TemperatureMatters #TrackingTools #ProjectControls