If you're managing a project, it's important to stay informed about work progress so that you can share updates with your team. Project tracking is a great way to keep a detailed watch on every stage of a project and note any completed milestones or potential setbacks. Learning more about project tracking and its best practices can help you develop the organizational skills you need to succeed in a project management position. This becomes ever more critical as you increase the number of projects being managed and their different milestones, deliverables and team members.
Project tracking is a way to follow, monitor and manage the progress of a series of work tasks. You can use project tracking to better understand if you're making enough progress to submit the project by its expected deadline and within budget. Tracking your project allows you to lay out each task and milestone to determine which you've completed and any upcoming items to accomplish. You can also use a project tracking to remain updated on the resources you've utilized to determine whether to supply more for yourself or your team. Monitoring your project's progress helps you locate any potential obstacles that could impact your ability to submit deliverables on time. You can use this information to implement plans that make necessary adjustments to your project to ensure you complete a quality project by its due date. There are several methods and tools you can use to track a project based on your preferences and organizational needs. However, these tools do not always fit for multidisciplinary projects like those Niche is involved with. For example, medical writing projects deal with specific deliverables in the form of documents. However, the estimated costs of these documents are based on the expected hours they are likely to take to deliver. In contrast, our clinical project management projects are based on the number of hours expended.
Importance of project tracking
Reviewing a project's performance regularly empowers you and other team members to remain updated on other necessary tasks or resources to provide for a quality, on-schedule assignment. This serves to increase communication among employees, resulting in a more collaborative and productive environment. Common benefits that showcase the importance of tracking the progress of projects include:
Keep everyone informed of a project's status: Depending on the project tracking method you use, team members can easily view the project's timeline and tasks in one location. This increases everyone's awareness of their assignments and deadlines to ensure they submit quality tasks on time.
Resolve challenges more efficiently: With a clear project tracking tool, teams can see the project's actual status compared to the projected timelines. You can use this information to implement strategies like shifting prioritization or offering resources to overcome any potential obstacles that affect your ability to complete the project by its deadline.
Motivate team members: Having a project tracking method in place offers employees a location to know their progress at all times and visualize how their individual items contribute to the entire project. They can use your tracking tools to mark when they finish each assignment to feel more accomplished and motivated to complete the next task.
Project trackers
A project tracker tool can support in managing several complex or competing projects and their requirements simultaneously. While you can always track your projects on your own by laying them out along with their subtasks and providing updates accordingly, you enter another level of efficiency with an online project tracking solution that can be accessed by all. Project tracking software tools can provide you with status updates and track your project's data. However, the problem is that they can be overly complex and begin as much time keeping them up to date and tailoring them than actually delivering the project.
Features to look for in a project tracking tool
If you'd prefer to use a software system to track your project's status, you can conduct research on various potential solutions to find one that offers accurate reporting, key data sets and interactive visuals. Common features to look for when searching for an effective project tracking tool include:
Data-tracking system: Many tracking tools automatically compile data you can use to accurately determine the status of your project. You can better understand which tasks employees complete and the likelihood of certain assignments being completed on time. It can also display the percentage of completion of the overall project so far and how much you have left until it's finished. You can compare these numbers with your projections to understand if you're on track to meet goals and to determine whether you should put an action plan in place to prevent delays.
Dashboard: Most tracking tools offer dashboards and interactive tools to see the progress of your projects as it occurs. These dashboards can gather your data, calculate it correctly and display it on your dashboard through various visuals. You can better understand your task completion progress by reviewing a series of charts, graphs and other interactive images.
Gantt chart: You can better visualize a project's timeline by seeing it in a Gantt chart view. This displays your project, its start and finish dates and milestones in a graph bar chart format. However, charts can become quite complex when they report multidisciplinary projects with multiple milestones.
Time-tracking tool: Many systems have time-tracking apps and time sheets to tell you how long it takes to complete each task. This allows you to assign more realistic deadlines to yourself and to other team members. You can also use this feature when tracking the progress of external or freelance employees for payroll purposes.
Develop a clear project plan: To more effectively understand if your project is making effective progress, try to establish a clear plan that details your objectives, employee assignments and target deadlines. You can easily compare your actual progress with this plan to determine how well you're performing and whether to put strategies in place to improve your progress.
Set realistic timelines: There may be several moments where unexpected challenges arise that cause your project to fall behind schedule, like lack of resources or time. Luckily, you can build flexible and easily adjustable timelines to account for these potential obstacles and priority shifts.
Team Communication: Try to find different ways to increase communication and collaboration between team members. Conduct regular meetings to discuss their progress, any resources needed to submit their tasks on time and project updates to ensure everyone remains informed at all times.
All these factors were considered when we developed the Niche project tracker. This week, Niche began using its proprietary project tracking tool. Combined with our time-tracking software, the tool will both facilitate project manaagement and team delivery. It can also be tailored to client needs, permitting non-Niche teams to follow their projects. Combined with our time tracking software it is also expected to collate sufficient data to improve the accuracy of our quotes.
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