Effective Strategies for Monitoring Daily Progress in Project Management (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Today we're talking about how to monitor daily progress as a project manager. I find it interesting that sometimes people can almost get offended or become defensive if you ask, where are you on the project? In truth, in life, we're always monitoring everything. We monitor our weight. We monitor our diet. We monitor our finances. Nowadays, people can monitor their children. Well, so let's look at why it's so important to monitor on your projects. Well, first of all, when we talk about progress, we're talking about forward movement towards a destination. And on a project, we have a start date and an end date. So we want to know when we started and when we stopped. So there are always people asking on the team, are we progressing? Are we there yet? And sometimes people like to have an indication, yes, we are advancing. So that's good news. So when we talk about progress, we're looking at different time intervals. Sometimes we look at, what did we do yesterday? So we're looking at the past. Sometimes we want to know, what are we doing today, like right now? And then sometimes we're concerned about tomorrow. We want to know about future projections. And when we look at this, all of this is some form of data. It could be historical. It could be real time, or it could, again, be projections. So now let's look at, again, when we're looking at progress, we're looking at, where are we now and where should we be? So if we look at where are we now, we're looking at the actual progress versus the expected progress, our goals, and many times our contractual expectations. So when we look at the difference between these two, we're talking about some form of variance. And here are the things that we want to monitor on a project. So we want to look at time. Where are we in relation to the schedule? Are we ahead of schedule? Are we behind schedule? We also want to look at the cost. Specifically, our budget. Are we meeting our budget? Are we exceeding our budget? We want to know about the money. So we also want to look at scope, because scope begins to be the deliverables we're producing, the products, or maybe the services. And then we also want to look at people. Do we have enough people? Do we have too many people? How do we need to compensate? So let's look at how we monitor, and specifically, we want to look at daily. So first of all, you set your intervals of when you want to monitor. For instance, if you're monitoring daily, you may want to look at specific reports or projections in the morning, maybe at noon, or even at night. And ideally, on a project, you're looking at things real time. So then you want to collect your data. So when we talk about collecting data, we want to look at what methods are we collecting that data. So today, the great thing is we have all kinds of project management software or tools we can look at, which makes it super simple. Then we can also look at different visuals. Today, we have all kinds of interactive methods, like interactive maps, maybe interactive monitors or trackers or scales. We can also survey people on the team. We can also conduct polls. And we can also pull different reports. And once we collect our data, then now what do we do with it? We can use that data to evaluate, again, where we are. And based upon the variance of where we are, we can look to adjust, again, looking at are we ahead of schedule, are we behind schedule, and then knowing how to adjust to get back on track. Depending upon where we are, we might need to renegotiate something on the project, and if so, we can also rebaseline. So with that, if you need a tool that can help you with your daily progress, then sign up for our software now at ProjectManager.com.