4.5.2 Project Monitoring and Tracking

The main goal of project managers for monitoring a project is to get visibility into the project execution so that they can determine whether any action needs to be taken to ensure that the project goals are met. As project goals are in terms of effort, schedule, and quality, the focus of monitoring is on these aspects. Different levels of monitoring might be done for a project. The three main levels of monitoring are activity level, status reporting, and milestone analysis. Measurements taken on the project are employed for monitoring.

Activity-level monitoring ensures that each activity in the detailed schedule has been done properly and within time. This type of monitoring may be done daily in project team meetings or by the project manager checking the status of all the tasks scheduled to be completed on that day. A completed task is often marked as 100% complete in detailed schedule—this is used by tools like the Microsoft Project to track the percentage completion of the overall project or a higher-level task. This monitoring is to ensure that the project continues to proceed as per the planned schedule.

Status reports are often prepared weekly to take stock of what has happened and what needs to be done. Status reports typically contain a summary of the activities successfully completed since the last status report, any activities that have been delayed, any issues in the project that need attention, and if everything is in place for the next week. Again, the purpose of this is to ensure that the project is proceeding as per the planned schedule.

The milestone analysis is done at each milestone or every few weeks, if milestones are too far apart, and is more elaborate. Analysis of actual versus estimated for effort and schedule is often included in the milestone analysis. If the deviation is significant, it may imply that the project may run into trouble and might not meet its objectives. This situation calls for project managers to understand the reasons for the variation and to apply corrective and preventive actions if necessary. Defects found by different quality control tasks, and the number of defects fixed may also be reported. This report monitors the progress of the project with respect to all the goals.