The projects that is have worked on, the milestones were the body of the project. I think that missing milestones can result in failure of the project. At least in the projects that I have worked on all the milestones were extremely critical and were considered in the panning initiation and planning phase as critical. I do think that they can be less critical milestone like filing, meeting etc. that are not part of the projects major requirements. Some milestones may require the completion of other milestone and the project may not be able to advance until these milestones are meet.

I worked with 2 project managers side by side as a Validation Engineer. Both had very different styles of working with their teams. One of the project managers was a micro manager- he kept on eye on all his team members activities always. This was his way of making sure his team did not make any mistakes. It was an effective method as all the milestones in his project were hit smoothly. The other micro manager was more laid back. She would get all her updated in the daily scrum calls and assign tasks and put much more trust in her team members. Both the PM’s management styles had different effect on different people. Personally, for me I preferred working with the latter as I like my team members trusting me and not hovering over my work too much.