Project tracking is the regular analysis of a project's progress and financial performance, in relation to an initially set objective.
Project tracking is a necessary action to guarantee the success of a project. There are many reasons why a project can fail, so it's important to have access to the information you need to monitor the project, such as task progress, adherence to budget and margins, or the status of work remaining to be done.
Ideally, all projects should be tracked. Even internal projects that do not generate direct profit should be tracked, so that the data can be used to answer the following questions:
Who worked on this project?
Overall, how much time do employees spend on internal projects?
How much do in-house projects cost?
For projects that generate turnover, it is even more important to ensure project monitoring for the reasons mentioned above.
Who is responsible for project follow-up?
The project manager is generally responsible for monitoring the project. This responsibility involves respecting a time objective (fixed duration or deadline for completing the project), a quantity objective for deliverables, a quality objective for deliverables, and a budget objective for completing the project.
Project managers need to be given responsibility for project follow-up. They need to be able to track a certain number of elements.
Task completion and quality of execution.
Monitoring costs and staying within budget.
Meeting overall project deadlines.
Project invoicing, where applicable.
How do you make a success of a project through effective follow-up?
The project manager must then be able to offerrealistic estimates. This then goes through:
analysis of available resources (financial, human, material),
consideration of the project's context,
prioritizing goals and tasks
risk anticipation.
Although preparation is long and time-consuming, it lays a solid foundation for good project follow-up and, ultimately, the overall success of the project .
Select resources strategically
Identify available resources
The resources allocated to a project determine its success.
Make sure that your project manager knows exactly what resources he or she has at his or her disposal, both human and material. human, financial and material.
Simulate scenarios using project management tools, and adjust as necessary.
To deliver a quality project on time, you'll need to organize your resources meticulously.
Stafiz integrates the most advanced functions on the market in terms of resource planning , including capacity planning - precise assessment of needs, anticipation of profile requirements & sourcing - employee allocation/planning and time tracking.
Step 1: Follow-up of task and schedule planning resource planning
Unsurprisingly, project schedule monitoring is essential to ensure that deadlines are met.
This involves planning tasks for each task manager, and checking that the load level is correctly calibrated. Contributors must be neither under- nor over-staffed to ensure smooth project execution.
GANTT charts are generally the best way to keep track of deadlines for different tasks.
Deadlines must be regularly reviewed by the project manager. If a task requires a larger-than-expected load on a task, the schedule must be updated immediately.
Ideally, the project tracking tool enables you to recalculate future costs as and when the project schedule is adjusted.
What actions can be taken when project monitoring indicates underperformance?
Reorganize the resource planning future project with perhaps more junior collaborators representing a lower cost but with the capacity to carry out the task with the same level of quality.
Reorganize tasks to reduce the time remaining to be spent on the project.
Re-negotiate the project's price with the customer to allow for a budget extension.
Step 2: Project accounting monitoring as a basis for management
In addition to anticipating risks and taking corrective action, project tracking enables you to step back and better prepare and budget future projects.
When a business involves a large number of projects, you need to be able to analyze historical performance to identify any corrections that need to be made.
For example, if margins are consistently below target, you need to understand why.
Are project times frequently higher than budgeted?
Is the distribution of time between different roles aligned with budgets?
Are subcontracting costs and purchases properly budgeted?
Is project pricing too low?
So many possible reasons to confirm in order to improve future performance.
Too regularly, financial teams or management controllers carry out analyzes on their own without sharing the information in real time with operational teams. This leads to inertia in project monitoring and prevents companies from quickly and efficiently improving their profitability.
Boost your project monitoring for more efficiency
Stafiz is the project monitoring tool focused on profitability and employee engagement. You manage your resource planning and manage your business.
Thanks to 360° and integrated monitoring of forecast KPIs — including resource planning , financial performance (margin etc.), project progress (deadlines) or even invoicing — you benefit from great visibility to plan and adjust your projects.
Everyone is empowered and equipped to act at the project level or up to the project portfolio vision for top management.
The indicators to be put in place to ensure effective project management are :
the percentage of project completion,
sales recognized to date,
project margin to date and margin on completion (taking into account what remains to be done),
task progress rate,
invoicing to date compared with sales recognized to date.
Project accounting remains the heart of the project monitoring reactor. It enables you to monitor the financial side of the project more effectively, and thus the project's overall performance.
Why invest in project tracking?
Project monitoring is worth investing in, because the stakes are so high: improving productivity and profitability.
What's more, it covers all the company's projects, both external, involving customers, and internal, enabling processes to be improved.
Reliable data
Data supports decision-making, so it must be accessible and up-to-date. This meansstructuring processes and organizing information.
Without a defined strategy, you run the risk of information being scattered across different media: excel files, emails, conversation threads and other applications.
But this practice is counter-productive: attention is dispersed, time is wasted, and there's a risk of losing information.
Improve performance visibility
The aim of project monitoring is to determine whether the project is on track. The first step is therefore to obtain a realistic vision of the current situation.
By investing in project monitoring, you gainvisibilityand have all the elements tomake informed decisions.
Adjusting resources
This visibility will enable the project manager to adjust resources .
Rigorous financial monitoring , for example, will help identify any discrepancies between budget consumption and forecasts.
Note that adjusting resources during the course of a project requires observation, rigor and flexibility.
Step 3: Setting up effective communications
Projects involve several contributors, who will need to have all possible resources at their disposal to communicate on progress and be able to pass on information to each other.
It is therefore necessary to set up communication based on listening and project follow-up meetings to share the situation and make the right arbitration decisions throughout the project.
Establishing indulgent communication
Project management involves people , so communication is key to theproject's success.
The project manager's role is to ensure that all those involved are able to communicate constructively constructively and constructive exchangewhether they be in-houseteams service providers or the customer.
How to organize an effective project monitoring meeting?
Meetings remain an important component of project follow-up, although they are generally not appreciated by teams .
Organized on a regular and structured basis, they enable management to obtain feedback on reality in the field, so as to identify any necessary readjustments concerning resources or even objectives. This responsiveness is a godsend when it comes to anticipating risks.
These follow-up meetings are prepared in five stages.
The project manager ensures that monitoring data is up to date and can be shared.
Completed tasks have already been reviewed by the manager. The project follow-up meeting should not be used to check the quality of these tasks, but to confirm their status (completed, in progress, to be reviewed, cancelled, etc.).
It is necessary to identify the bottlenecks of the project and prioritize the review of tasks, starting with those which represent a bottleneck.
Systematically review the schedule: anticipate the remaining work to be done on each task and allocate the associated workload in the employee schedule.
Check that the margin on completion of the project remains in line with the budget.
Structure follow-up meetings
You know the saying: the shortest jokes are the best. This also applies to meetings, which should neither be too long nor too frequent, as this could create frustration.
Breaking down silos bymaking information accessiblewill allow effective project monitoring.
Teams need the right level of information to facilitate collaboration. In this way, everyone can fulfill their role effectively.
Project monitoring tools
Specifications
Specifications are an essential part of project management, as they define the objectives to be achieved and the deliverables expected.
It serves as a reference and structures the customer's expectations in terms of objectives, deadlines, costs and expenses, as well as the division of tasks by role.
The schedules
Gantt chart
The Gantt chart provides agraphical visualizationof the project over agiven period, in the form of a timeline. It is used to plan and monitor the progress of tasks.
Gantt in Stafiz
The Gantt chart helps to quickly identify thedependencies of tasksbetween them and thus identify which tasks could be affected by a delay.
The Kanban view
Kanban offers another visualization mode, this time in the form of columns. It is generally organized in at least 3 columns: to do, in progress, finished.
Kanban in Stafiz
Dashboards
Project monitoring dashboardsare invaluable tools. They enable you to centralize and aggregate and aggregate information to obtain a global view of the project.
Each project should have a dashboard available to study the defined KPIs. Certain indicators remain essential to observe in project monitoring:
objectives achieved and remaining ;
the status of the various tasks ;
the latest updates.
A dashboard in Stafiz with a forecast view of KPIs: here margin, progress and achievement rate
Project management software
You can make project tracking easier and more accessible by using adedicated project tracking tool. They centralize data making it reliable, accessible and up-to-date.
Information flows more smoothly, facilitating communication between project stakeholders .
What's more, some of these software packages offerautomationfunctions . This saves a considerable amount of time, and reduces double-entry errors, giving you greater precision.
Stafiz centralizes data at several levels. All costs are taken into account, as well as revenues, in a full-cost accounting logic. Activity management is integrated from start to finish: from opportunity management to invoicing. You convert your opportunities into missions immediately with the initial plan; KPIs are accurate and automatically updated in the forecast.
This feature will help prepareprogress meetingsso that they are as productive as possible.
Global visualization
The value of management software lies in its ability to provide a global view, either of a project or of a portfolio of projects.
This proves to be strategic on two levels, from a macro and micro point of view.
Macro vision
Good visibility from a macro point of view will enable you to monitor the project portfolio, and therefore all your projects. First of all, you'll be able to ensure that current projects remain aligned with long-term strategy strategy.
Then, you will have all the information necessary todistribute your resources appropriatelyor makeadjustments.
Micro vision
From a micro point of view, you'll have precise, reliable and up-to-date data to monitor your project .
You'll then be able to analyze any discrepancies and get a clear picture of the objectives achieved, those still to be achieved, and the resources consumed.
