Project Tracking Guide: How to Make It Effective

What is Project Tracking?

Project tracking is the regular analysis of a project's progress and financial performance compared to its initial goals.

Project monitoring is a necessary action to ensure the success of a project. There are many reasons why a project can fail, so it is imperative to have access to information that allows you to track the project, such as the progress of tasks, compliance with budget and margins, or updating the rest of the work to be done, for example.

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 are the employees who worked on this project?
• Overall, how much time do employees spend on internal projects?
• What is the cost of internal projects?

For projects that generate revenue, it is even more important to ensure project follow-up for the reasons mentioned above.

What's the difference between Project Management and Project Monitoring?

Project management and project monitoring are often equated, but they differ in the scope of their actions.

• A strategic vision

Like business management, project management includes a strategic vision, responding to decision-making issues and includes steps such as: 

• • The measure
  • Anticipation
  • Simulation
  • Fit

• An operational dimension

Project management focuses on the operational dimension of the project, with a more limited strategic vision. It essentially includes day-to-day monitoring of production.

What is the difference between project tracking and project management?

Project monitoring and project management are also often confused.

In fact, project tracking is an integral part of project management and project monitoring.

• Collect data

Monitoring consists of collecting data that will be used for decision-making.

Tools like dashboards, time trackers, and meetings feed into this data collection.

• Compare data

Focused on ongoing activities, project monitoring must be continuous and regular. 

The data collected and analysed helps to identify and evaluate the discrepancies between the actual and the forecast.

Who is in Charge of Project Tracking?

It is generally the project manager who is in charge of tracking the project. This responsibility involves meeting a time objective (fixed duration or deadline set to complete the project), a quantity of deliverables objective, a deliverable quality objective and an objective of respecting the project budget .

Project managers must be made responsible by giving them the responsibility of project monitoring. They need to be able to track a number of things.

• Theperformance of the tasks and the quality of the workmanship.
• Cost tracking and budgeting.
• Compliance with overall project deadlines.
• Project invoicing if applicable.

How to Track a Project?

Careful Preparation

Preparation is a key step in the five phases of project management. Indeed, it will clarify certain points such as:

• the expected deliverables,
• the budget,
• the deadlines,
• key competences,
• the different stages that make up the project,
• the tasks for each deliverable.

The project manager must then be able to offer realistic estimates. This then goes through:

• the analysis of the resources available (financial, human, material),
• taking into account the context in which the project takes place,
• Prioritization of objectives and tasks
• risk anticipation.

If the preparation is long and time-consuming, it allows you to establish a solid foundation for a good project follow-up and ultimately, the overall success of the project.

Strategic Resource Allocation

• Identify available resources

The resources allocated to a project determine its success.

Make sure your project manager knows exactly what resources they have, human, financial, and material.

• Maximize resource planning's use 

In terms of human resources, the Understanding of the challenges of the resource planning and its strategic implementation will be a valuable asset.

• Simulate and adjust

Simulate scenarios with project management tools, and adjust as needed.

To deliver a quality project on time, you'll need to organize your resources carefully.

Stafiz integrates the most advanced functions on the market in terms of resource planning , including resource capacity planning - precise assessment of needs, anticipation of profile requirements & sourcing - employee allocation/planning and time tracking.

Learn more about the resource planning with Stafiz

Monitoring of the task schedule and the resource planning

Unsurprisingly, project schedule tracking is essential to ensure deadlines are met.

This involves planning the project tasks on each task manager, and checking that the load level is properly calibrated. Contributors must not be understaffed or overburdened to ensure the proper execution of the project.

GANTT charts are generally the most appropriate approach to be able to track the deadlines to be met on the different tasks.

The deadlines should be regularly reviewed by the project manager. If you need to schedule a larger workload than expected on a task, you should update the schedule immediately.

Ideally, the project tracker allows you to recalculate future costs as the project schedule is adjusted.

Accounting In Project Tracking

In addition to anticipating risks and carrying out corrective actions, project tracking allows you to take a step back to better prepare and budget future projects.

When an activity requires many projects, it is necessary to be able to analyze historical performance to identify corrections to be made.

For example, if margins are consistently below target, you need to understand why.

• Are the times spent on the project frequently more than budgeted?
• Is the distribution of time between the different roles aligned with the budgets?
• Are subcontracting fees and purchases budgeted correctly?
• Is the pricing of projects too low?

So many possible reasons to be confirmed in order to improve future performance.

Too regularly, finance teams or management controllers do analyses on their own without sharing information in real time with operational teams. This leads to inertia in project monitoring and prevents companies from improving their profitability quickly and efficiently.

Setting Up Effective Communication

Projects involve several contributors, who will need to have all the resources possible to communicate progress and be able to share information with 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 humans: communication is therefore key and conditions the success of the project.

The role of the project manager is to ensure that all stakeholders manage to exchange in a constructive and benevolent way, whether they are internal teams, service providers or the client.

 

How to Organize an Effective Project Tracking Meeting?

Meetings remain an important component of project tracking, although they are generally not appreciated by teams.

To be organized in a regular and structured way, they allow management to obtain feedback on the reality on the ground in order to identify the necessary adjustments concerning resources or even objectives. This responsiveness is a godsend for anticipating risks. 

• Structure follow-up meetings

These follow-up meetings are prepared in five steps.

1. The project manager ensures that the tracking data is up-to-date and that he or she can share it.
   
2. The tasks carried out have already been reviewed by the manager. The project follow-up meeting should not be used to check the quality of these tasks, but should confirm the status of the tasks (completed, in progress, to be reviewed, cancelled, etc.).
3. You need to identify the bottlenecks of the project and prioritize the review of tasks, starting with those that represent a bottleneck.
4. Systematically review the schedule: anticipate the rest to be done on each task and allocate the associated load in the employees' schedule.
5. Check that the project completion margin remains aligned with the budget.

 

You know the saying: the shortest jokes are the best. This also applies to meetings, which should not be too long or too frequent, at the risk of creating frustration. 

To keep them productive, make sure you have an agenda and identified performance metrics to track. They will help guide your decisions.

 

• Facilitate access to information

Breaking down silos by making information accessible will allow for effective project tracking.

Indeed, teams must have the right level of information in order to facilitate collaboration. This allows everyone to fulfil their role effectively.

 

Project Tracking Tools Options

Project Specifications

The specifications are an essential element of project tracking as they define the objectives to be achieved and the expected deliverables.

It serves as a reference and structures the client's expectations in terms of objectives, deadlines, deadlines, costs and expenses as well as in the distribution of tasks by roles.

 

Schedules

• The Gantt chart

The Gantt chart provides a graphic visualization of the project over a given period in the form of a timeline. It is used to plan and monitor the progress of tasks.

The Gantt chart helps to quickly identify the dependencies of tasks on each other and thus identify which tasks could be affected by a delay.

 

• The Kanban view

Kanban offers another way of viewing, this time in the form of columns. It is generally organized in at least 3 columns: to do, in progress, completed. 

Dashboards

Project tracking dashboards are valuable tools. They make it possible to centralize and aggregate information in order to obtain a global vision of the project.

Each project should have a dashboard to study the defined KPIs. Some indicators remain essential to observe in project tracking: 

• the objectives achieved and remaining;
• the statutes of the various tasks;
• the latest updates.

 

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.

 

The flow of information will be more fluid, 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 logic called full costs in accounting. Activity management is integrated from end to end: from opportunity management to invoicing. You convert your opportunities into a mission immediately with the initial plan; KPIs are accurate and automatically up-to-date in forecasting.

Learn more about Stafiz

 

Here is a list of the features that management software like Stafiz has.

 

Category of needs	Needs	Example of tools
Communication and fluidity of exchanges	You need your team to be in sync and exchange regularly You need to organize your tasks in a simple way	Microsoft project, Trello, monday.com
Project and client portfolio management	You need to plan your resources and consultants, anticipate skills needs You want to accurately track your resources: resource planning, purchases, expenses and have the impact on the forecast You need to make trade-offs about which resources to implement	Stafiz – Project management and monitoring

• Real-time tracking 

The real-time monitoring of status, budget and completed tasks will facilitate responsiveness.

 

• Generating progress reports

This feature will help in the preparation of progress meetings so that they are as productive as possible.

 

• Global visualization 

The interest of management software lies in its ability to provide a global view, either at the level of a project or a portfolio of projects.

This is strategic at two levels, from a macro and micro point of view. 

 

• Macro vision

Good visibility from a macro point of view will make it possible to monitor the portfolio of projects, and therefore the set of projects. First of all, you will be able to ensure that the projects in progress remain aligned with the company's long-term strategy .

Then, you will have all the information you need to allocate your resources in a relevant way or make adjustments.

 

• Micro Vision

From a micro perspective, you'll have accurate, reliable, and up-to-date data to track 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.