This is part of an ongoing series about overcoming common reasons behind project failure.
Like anything with a lot of moving pieces, success or failure often depends on the changes that happen along the way. Projects are no exception. Successful project management should efficiently track changes to keep everyone on your team accountable as well as keep an audit trail for stakeholders.
But project tracking is more than just establishing checkpoints and milestones—it's creating a full-fledged system for monitoring their completion, reporting truthfully on whether or not they were successfully completed, and if any problems were encountered.
With a good tracking system in place, it's nearly impossible to let unfinished tasks or missed deadlines slip through the cracks unnoticed. However, when you're missing an adequate tracking management system, the following can happen:
You can't measure a project's progress
How will you, your team, and management know when a project is going well or when it's gone south?
Project managers are often challenged by determining whether or not a project is successful, especially since those involved may have different perspectives on what successful completion looks like.
Here are some specific ways for measuring progress:
“Earned Value” Management: This is a technique to monitor the project plan, actual work and work completed value to see if a project is on track. Earned Value shows how much of the budget and time should have been spent right alongside the amount of work done so far.
Milestones: Milestones can be any significant checkpoint or phrase in the project lifecycle. They can also be any highly significant task, event, or decision for a given amount of work.
Status Reports: Status reports, whether they're weekly or monthly, help managers to observe tasks and their progress. They can help track whether the project's initial goals can still be met after a certain period of time, or if adjustments need to be made as a result of changing circumstances. They are also helpful for reviewing a team’s performance and enable managers to quickly step in when a problem comes up.
Data Integration with Software: As projects grow in size and complexity, tracking the progress of potentially hundreds of stakeholders can be cumbersome. This is where the software tools in place become critical. Good project management software can let you automate your project tracking to request approvals, notify stakeholders when changes occur, and give your teams real-time status updates. At the same time, a good project management software tool should give you real-time analytics from any mobile device, so you can see the status of your project or any given task related to it at any time.
Your project goes over your proposed budget and time
With poor tracking in place, it becomes difficult to know when you need to reallocate resources or immediately fix problems, which can invariably lead to a project going over budget or missing crucial deadlines.
With fewer than a third of all projects successfully completed on time and on budget, this is a huge problem for many project managers. It usually ties back to setting milestones to achieve the desired end date. Not taking milestones seriously can drag projects out which can cause you to lose momentum and waste time catching up.
Your team gets overwhelmed and suffers burnout
You may find that completing a milestone is going to be more challenging than originally anticipated. Maybe it's more expensive than original estimates, or requires more “hands on deck” than initially anticipated. Whatever problem you identify, tracking helps to get an immediate snapshot of the status of your whole team so you can make adjustments.
Tracking is also useful to make sure you're not over-assigning tasks to people on your team feeling overwhelmed. And it makes it easy to know when a milestone has been completed.
Scope creep sets in
It's not unlikely for management, clients, or even vendors to add more requirements even with your project well underway. You may be happy to please them, but without a project tracking system, you might not realize that some or all of their added expectations are unrealistic. A PMI 2017 report found nearly 50% of business projects experience scope creep.
With a tracking system, you should be able to tell them what is and isn't reasonable, and if they're adamant, what in your project would have to be shifted to meet their needs.
You suffer from data overload
Effective project management tracking really comes down to staying organized. There's always an endless stream of spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and other project documents to keep track of, and it doesn't take much time before your desktop and inbox get cluttered.
It’s easy to get lost in data overload. A comprehensive look at the problem of lost information by Xenit, a Belgian-based IT company, noted that a “[In 2012], McKinsey reported that ‘employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information.’”
Their review found that six years after the McKinsey report, the issue still hadn’t gone away: A study by Nintex showed that 49% of 1,000 employees surveyed said they struggled to locate documents related to their work. Some 43% also struggled with issues of document sharing and document approval requests. Overall, 39% of employees felt their organization suffered from broken document management processes.
Software automation tools can keep all your documents in one centralized location that's easily searchable and attached to a specific checkpoint or milestone. You can also use services like Google Drive or Box to keep all related files together and make notes with your team.
Final thoughts
Good intentions can turn sour fast if unexpected surprises create a bottleneck or issue of accountability in the middle of a project. Before you and your team hit the ground running, spend time to construct a tracking system to help you better manage people, equipment, time and money to successfully complete your project.
To learn more about project management and how you can improve your likelihood of success, download our free eBook, Why Projects Fail & How To Fix Them.
This book covers topics including:
- Weak communication
- Issues of accountability
- Challenges with setting goals & objectives
About the Author
Nicole is Director of Marketing at Kintone, with 10+ years experience in content strategy, campaign management, lead acquisition and building positive work cultures of empowered, purpose-driven team members. She spent seven years as a journalist, previously serving as a CBS San Francisco digital producer, NPR contributor, Patagon Journal deputy editor and reporter for several publications, including the Chicago Tribune. She's passionate about the tech for good space, social entrepreneurship and women leadership. On the weekends, you’ll likely find her putting her Master Gardener skills to use in at community gardens in Oakland.
