What project managers need to monitor

Tracking or monitoring the progress of the work with respect to the time and scope decided is one of the main tasks of a project manager, but it is far from obvious.

1) The question that all project managers who are going to do the tracking ask themselves is, what should I monitor? What level of detail do I need to go to to be sure I'm doing a good job as a project manager? The first thing to know is that the level of detail of the monitoring is decided by the Project Manager. It is up to you to decide whether you want to keep monitoring progress at the deliverable or workpackage level, at the activity level or at the action level.


It automatically decides at which level to monitor when creating the project gantt. Think about it: if you put 1000 small tasks on a Gantt chart, then you will need to track and close them all.


2) It is also necessary to decide how the progress of the activities in the Gantt will be marked. There are several ways to do this. 0%-50%-100% of completion can be done where 50% is any activity at least started and not completed. Or 0%-10%-50%-100% where 50% or ask team members to accurately report completion status.

I personally believe that it is not effective to track the exact status based on feedback, for example the 65%, unless you are following a project that allows you to do this: installing new software on a 100 machines. This is because the completion estimate given by the people carrying out an activity can hardly be accurate. Suffice it to say that people who carry out a business may perhaps give rough estimates because they do not have time to make an accurate estimate. Or maybe they tend to overestimate or underestimate the work completed on the basis of their character, someone will tend to overestimate, someone else to underestimate the percentage of completion.

It is therefore better to focus on what problems or risks can slow down or prevent the completion of the activity and focus on solving this type of situation.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

en_GBEnglish