Milestone Meetings
Every milestone must have milestone meetings. Some milestones have internal meetings as well as the external (i.e. with the customer) meetings. External milestone meetings typically involve several customer stakeholders for a large period of time (half a day, a full day or even more, depending on the agenda and on the complexity of the project). External meetings can involve travel to the customer premises (to Cannes or wherever the customer is located, which could be "nice").Each milestone meeting has a specific agenda, but typically will involve overviewing the work performed in the current phase, performing a walk-through of some deliverable documents, presenting some statistics on the work thas has been performed, making clear whatever open issues that were still left unclosed and a final special moment where the customer confirms that it's ok to move to the next phase (that statement should be present in the meeting minutes, by the way).
Typically it is a good idea that the QMS has some kind of guide to help the (project) management team as well as the rest of the team preparing the milestone meeting. Here's an example in the format of a "Project Life Cycle Milestone Meetings Guidebook" (internal) :
- https://quality.critical.pt/QMS%20PT/MAN-management/MAN-01-project-management/CSW-QMS-2009-GBK-03894-project-milestones-meetings.pdf#search=milestone%20meeting%20gbk
- Details on a possible TOC can be found here.
Milestone Reports
As a result of a successful milestone being achieved, a milestone meeting report is produced (and this is typically the exit criteria of the phases - the existence of an approved milestone review report by the customer).This NASA document has example TOCs for those reports (and much more):
Example of those deliverables are:
- PDR Report (Preliminary Design Review Report)
- CDR Report (Critical Design Review Report)
- QR Report (Qualification Review Report)
- AR Report (Acceptance Review Report)
