Project Progress: Tips for Successful Progress Tracking

Keeping project progress on track is one of the project manager’s main duties, but also one of the most difficult things to do right.

Projects have many moving parts; ensuring that project teams, clients, tasks, finances, and timelines operate smoothly and in tandem is no small feat.

Scope creep, task delays, resource bottlenecks — all of this can impact your progress and delivery. Preparing a comprehensive strategy for your upcoming projects is your best chance at managing all of this.

This article will discuss the overall project tracking process, including how to handle your communications, track KPIs, manage responsibilities and goals, and other strategies for successful project delivery.

Key Takeaways

Project tracking is the process of managing progress during the various stages of the project lifecycle to ensure successful delivery. This includes all project phases, including initiation and closure, but mostly focuses on the longest part of the end-to-end project management lifecycle — the project execution phase.

This includes monitoring three essential resources: time, budget, and project teams. These components are all associated with different challenges and things to look out for.

Why is project tracking so important? Here are just a couple of reasons:

We can separate a project into phases.

Here’s an overview of the most important things to track during each phase of professional services project management:

Despite how well you’ve set up your project goals and plans, challenges are bound to occur, whether due to internal or external changes. In general, project managers and their teams often struggle with:

Early identification is very important for risk management, though this is difficult to do. Even when they’re recognized, risks are also often underestimated or not prioritized well. In general, risk management requires previous experience on similar projects, having a very firm grasp on your business capabilities, and setting clear and realistic expectations during project initiation.

Even when risks are correctly identified, are they communicated to relevant shareholders, and how? According to a survey by Havas, only 56% of clients believe they have an honest and transparent relationship with their service providers. However, effective communication is crucial. It can even prevent issues before they occur—for example, showing clients how certain changes impact project objectives can help manage scope creep.

Accurate reporting ties into the previous two issues. If you aren’t tracking your project budget or progress analytics in real-time, you won’t be able to make informed decisions or provide timely updates to stakeholders. Inconsistent reporting or lack of alignment over key metrics is another issue. Inaccurate or delayed reporting can lead to miscommunication, overlooked risks, and ineffective management of project timelines and resources.

Finally, change management ties all of these challenges into one. It requires spotting roadblocks early on and communicating them to key parties to implement a solution in a timely manner. Accurate reporting is then needed to assess the impact of your solution on further project progress.

If we put numbers to the most common factors of project challenges, it looks something like this:

Next, we’ll examine some specific strategies for resolving them.

Here’s a list of the top strategies businesses can use to manage their project scope and lead more successful projects.

Implementing time tracking is a no-brainer — but another thing is ensuring that your employees are doing it right. Using an integrated timer to track time from minute to minute can be a good option, as it gives you a real overview of how employees spend their time.

But you’ll need to adjust your tracking according to your team’s preferences, working styles, and tasks. If your teams are working on multiple projects or smaller tasks per day, it might be distracting to manage all of this with a timer.

Consider using a software solution that offers multiple options, such as manual entry or automatic tracking (for example, with Productive, you can schedule your resources and then have time entries created automatically according to this information).

In any case, time tracking is the basis for everything, including successful project delivery and better estimation for future projects.

There are two useful strategies for defining your goals and dividing responsibilities across team members. One is the so-called SMART framework, which ensures that project goals are:

For responsibilities, there’s the RACI matrix. For projects, you need to determine who is:

There’s also RASCI, which adds “Supportive” into the mix, or employees who provide assistance to others in responsible roles.

While you can handle your employees by scheduling them to tasks across projects (by using, for example, a Gantt chart), a resourcing plan is best for a comprehensive overview of availability and capacity.

You can use it to view the load on each employee and their resource utilization rate across time. It also depicts holidays and time off to show you real insights into who is busy and who can be allocated to a project.

Your resourcing is also tied to project finances, so you can view how your scheduling impacts budgets, profit margins, and revenue.

The frequency of your communication and the amount of engagement a client has in the project can vary from project to project. This is why it’s important to set these expectations from the start and stick to your agreement.

You can also set up a way for clients to get information without scheduling meetings, which might be preferable for businesses that want to keep in sync without closely managing the project. For example, some project management tools provide free client access and user permissions, including everything from opening and commenting to tasks to reviewing budgets.

Keeping all information in one place is also key to reducing miscommunication and project delays, for example, in the task comment section. It makes internal collaboration and communication more efficient:

Learn how Productive supports efficient business operations.

Combining quantitative and qualitative methods provides a comprehensive view of your project’s progress. Quantitative methods involve tracking numbers, such as budget usage, time spent, and task completion rates. Qualitative methods include gathering insights through meetings, feedbacks, and 1-on-1s.

Together, these methods offer a balanced perspective on your actual progress.

You know you need to track KPIs, but which are the most important? Some include:

Project management tools can automate KPI tracking and provide real-time insights with dashboards and reports.

Instead of waiting for customers to request progress reports, set up a regular tempo for sharing and reviewing your project’s progress so everyone can stay up to date. Putting together an exhaustive project report can take a lot of time; in fact, around 30% of managers report spending one or more days manually creating reports (Wellingtone).

Instead, you can consider automating this process. Your reporting tool can gather and calculate this data in real time, and all you need to do is set up automatic sending via email or Slack or set up a custom dashboard.

Online project management software can bring many benefits to your processes, including:

Some specific features to keep an eye out for include task management and status updates, Gantt charts and other views for project visibility, client access portal and user permissions, resourcing and financial management.

Check out our article on agency management systems or click here to learn more.

A project status report is a document that contains essential information on project milestones, budget spent and remaining, costs, project timelines, and future outlook.

Here are three steps for creating progress reports people will actually read, according to PMI:

Project management software with client portal features can help you do all of this and more. For example, Productive offers a project progress template that gathers your crucial information, including scheduled time vs time worked, recognized revenue and profit, cost, and margin.

Productive is an all-in-one tool software for professional services, designed to support all project planning phases — from initiation to post-completion insights. Productive goes a step further by supporting agency growth with in-depth financial and resourcing insights.

With Productive, you can:

Book a demo with Productive today.

You can also check out our article on what is project management software, its key features and benefits, to learn all you need to know.

Effectively track project progress by setting clear goals and teams responsibilities, holding regular meetings and feedback sessions with key stakeholders, providing visibility into tasks and resources, and using a project management tool to speed up the entire process.

Some of the key metrics for project progress tracking include completion rates, budget variance, resource utilization, forecasted profitability and revenue, and estimated vs planned time of completion. These metrics provide insights into a mix of finances, costs, employees, and actual progress.

To identify and address roadblocks, make sure you’re maintaining regular and clear communication with your internal and external teams and monitoring project metrics. Even so, unexpected issues can occur. Resolve them by reallocating resources, adjusting schedules, and tracking the impact of changes on project scope.

The stages of a project lifecycle include initiation, planning, execution, and closure. Each is associated with specific challenges and strategies to address them.

Communicate project progress to stakeholders through regular project status reports, meetings, or online software solutions with capabilities such as customizable dashboards and automated reports.

Common challenges of tracking project progress include identifying and managing risks, tracking metrics, implementing change, and ensuring clear and transparent communication. Some specific factors that can contribute to delays include scope creep and resource bottlenecks.

A popular project management tool for keeping projects on track is Productive. Productive includes collaboration, financial and resource management capabilities in a single platform. Some other solutions include Trello for simple task management, Jira for software development projects, and Asana for basic time tracking and project management.