You have a fresh project right handed to you. You have a terrific staff to assist you in realizing your vision for the completed result. Everything is starting off rather nicely.
All too frequently, though, things go wrong even under careful project management. Although rates vary depending on the sector, the Project Management Institute estimates that around 15% of projects are regarded as total failures. Of those who make it, almost half fail to satisfy time obligations, 43% run over budget, and 32% fall short of some measure of product quality.
How can you help your project not to fall apart? Should time, money, and product be the three most often occurring obstacles, how can one produce favorable results in those spheres? Follow the development of your project.
Though keeping an eye on project development can make all the difference between success and project failure, it may sound too easy to be the secret to success. It’s not complex; with some effort, you can guide your staff toward effective project completion.
Difficulties after Project Advancement
Although keeping current on project development is important, it is not always easy. These are only a few obstacles that complicate project tracking:
- Many times, initiatives are not meticulously planned and recorded.
- Sometimes random project task distribution makes tracking challenging.
- Many initiatives lack appropriate communication, hence everyone is not in agreement.
- Not all projects follow regular update sessions.
- Many initiatives avoid using Google project management tools that enable effective tracking by means of interaction with Google apps.
Reversing one or more of the above listed helps one or more overcome the difficulties in tracking projects.
Effective Tracking of Project Progress
In project management, these five suggestions can help you to fairly assess project development:
1. Make it a team effort
Everybody on your team wants a great project. Keeping this in mind, call a kickoff meeting, present your vision and the client’s motives, and ask your team for comments.
Since it is mostly up to those members to fulfill the project objectives, it is very crucial that your project team members help to define your aims.
2. Utilize reporting tools to monitor project progress
Using a project management tool will be quite beneficial in creating automatic progress reports. A project reporting tool in the project management system can provide correct information in just a few clicks instead of you evaluating development toward deadlines individually or trying to figure percentages of completion.
3. Establish good goals
You cannot monitor something you have not established. Good objectives are measurable, reasonable, and unambiguous. After jotting down a basic sketch of your project goals, review them to find if they satisfy the following criteria:
- Reasonable: Though stretch goals can be a terrific way to challenge your team, always keep things realistic. Having high goals is great. You want not to promise your customers anything you cannot keep. Can we reach this objective with the given time and resources at hand?
- Clear-cut: The most often mentioned reason behind project failures by many project managers is a lack of clear objectives. Ask yourself: Exactly what is being expected of us? Do every team member grasp?
- Measurable: Saying, “finish phase one in a timely manner” or “increase capacity,” for instance, is insufficient. You need numbers. Choose the date phase one should be finished and choose your baseline, reasonable, and optimum capacity values. Ask yourself: Exist any measurable metrics by which we may evaluate every goal?
4. Make the project visible
Making the project visible to every member of your team will help to encourage success among other things. When your staff can see the objectives they have helped create as well as the advancement—or lack—being made toward those goals, it is quite inspirational.
A basic and efficient visual solution for workflow organization is the Kanban approach. It balances needs against available capacity, promotes small-scale improvements, and helps to avoid congestion. Physical Kanban boards might simply sticky notes put on an empty wall, or you could go digital with worldwide shared online workplaces.
- Step 1: List the several phases of your workflow and make a column for every one.
- Step 2: Create a card for every chore or project component you need finished.
- Step 3: Arrange your cards in the columns that show the position of every chore or project in the flow of business. Move the card to the next column as chores go from one phase to the next until it has gone through all the phases of your process.
Every team member receives a quick view of the phase-through task distribution. This informs every team member about who is waiting, who requires assistance, which chores are past due, and what has to be done going forward.
5. Check-in with your team regularly
Be consistent. Resist the want to “set it and forget it.” Make a project calendar for yourself to monitor the objectives you developed with your team. Deadlines are clear-cut markers, yet waiting until the deadline will cause you to miss chances for course correction. Choose to be proactive rather than reactive.
Make appointments for yourself to track development over the course of the project on frequent intervals. You can then handle problems early on to keep your project under control.
