How To Keep A Project On Track: 7 Key Strategies
Project Tracking is Key: Tracking progress properly helpsprojects stay within budget, meet deadlines, and fulfill scope, which in turn makes it easier to report progress to stakeholders.
The Right Tools for Success: Choose suitable project management software for your use case—it should provide dashboard functionality for monitoring metrics and quickly identifying problems or issues.
Say No to Scope Creep: Clearly define project scope and gain agreement among stakeholders in advance to prevent scope creep, get alignment on project boundaries, and avoid project failure.
Set SMART Goals: Use the SMART goal model to set measurable, realistic project goals and establish clear success metrics and timeframes for accountability.
Without an idea of how to keep your project on track, you can quickly find yourself over budget, behind schedule, and with deliverables that don't fulfill the scope. Not to mention, it will be difficult to report progress to stakeholders.
Understanding how to keep track of projects is critical to supporting successful, on-time deliverables. Here are my top project management tips for keeping your projects and your team members on the path to success.
1. Use the Right Project Management Tools
Tracking project progress without software is quite difficult to do. The right project management software and apps will offer functionality for:
- Tracking progress on dashboards. Look for project tracking tools with dashboard functionality. When you can create customized dashboards, you can see important project metrics at a glance as the project leader, allowing you to quickly identify if things are off track.
- Tracking time for billing or other purposes
- Managing internal team collaboration and communication
- Creating views for stakeholders so they can track progress on their own time (instead of sending constant emails or requests for information to you or your project team)
All of this is very difficult to do manually. Keep in mind that an effective project management tool is one that supports your methodology (e.g. agile or waterfall).
If you work mainly with Kanban boards, for example, Trello might be a good solution. Monday's templates, which supercharge the concept of a spreadsheet might be more appropriate for your use case. If your team is working with ticket structures, something like Asana might be the right choice.
2. Get Clear On Project Scope
Scope creep is one of the most common reasons for project failure. Prevention goes a long way on this one, so avoid scope creep by:
- Defining the project thoroughly. Make a list of what the project will and won’t do and plan to stick with it.
- Communicating scope. Make sure everyone involved, including the project team, knows the defined scope and agrees to it. Get agreements in writing, (e.g. a response to an email), whenever possible.
- Being realistic about potential results. Avoid over-promising. Committing to pie-in-the-sky deliverables sets you and your team up for failure.
- Using a RACI matrix to define stakeholders. Limit your stakeholders and collaborators to those who are responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.
3. Define SMART Project Goals
Use the SMART goal model to set project goals that can realistically be achieved by the deliverables. Collaborate with your team, subject-matter experts, and stakeholders to consider what's desired and what's feasible.
Set specific project KPIs and metrics so you can measure project success and you'll know when it's achieved.
4. Set Realistic Milestones
Set realistic deadlines, time boundaries, and due dates for your project. The main due date for your project will likely come from an external source—an executive project champion or a client, for example. They will likely have input on the individual project milestones as well.
Once you understand the needs of external stakeholders, fill in the details of your project outline with internal milestones. Depending on the project's complexity, you might need to employ tactics for handling overlapping tasks and deadlines (normally associated with managing multiple projects).
You can also use visual tools and resources such as Gantt charts to map out the required tasks for your project. This helps you see the overall project timeline and understand dependencies—project failure can sometimes be the results of a misunderstanding about what work must be done before other work can start.
By mapping and planning ahead for dependencies, you can better allocate project resources at the right time for each effort.
5. Hold Regular Check-ins
Regular project status meetings are a key step in project tracking, and you should also make use of any automated communication features in your chosen project management software.
Discuss meeting cadences and set check-in schedules at the outset of the project.
Holding a major check-in meeting every week isn’t always productive. For simple projects, there may not be much movement on project week-to-week. Other stakeholders might want to be reassured on a regular basis that the project is on track. For them, a weekly touch base call might feel necessary.
6. Use Time Tracking
Use time tracking software to keep an eye on team member workload and how much time is being spent on each deliverable. This will help you track project progress and get a sense of how quickly the budget is being used compared to how quickly the project schedule is elapsing.
Ask project team members to track their time in the software. Tracking time often automatically improves time management, and it provides you with the data you need to make better project plans for future projects.
7. Plan For Risks In Advance
At the beginning of a project, create a risk register or RAID log, and document any and all potential risks that could impact your project should they arise. Having risk responses planned in advance can save your project from failure and ensure a successful project.
Proper project tracking will allow you to recognize and respond quickly when these risks do arise. You need to be able to understand when your project is in deep trouble and then take the steps outlined in your risk register to minimize or avoid any negative impacts.
What's Next?
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