So, you’ve been working hard. You have a clear project plan and schedule. You have got a good management structure in place. Everyone is clear what success means for this project. And off they go! Work starts, and then… well, then what?

Today in Project Management Guide, we are looking at how to monitor the progress of your project – are you getting closer to a successful finish?

Now, we know we want to monitor progress on the project. But how do we actually do that? Asking everyone on the project team if they are finished yet is unlikely to produce a happy team, or any useful information.

No, first we need to define what we are going to monitor. What can we point at as showing that work has been done, and more importantly, that useful work has been done? What are the indicators that the project is progressing?

The choice of indicators can be helped by looking back at your project plan. The Outputs and the Quality Criteria will give you ideas for what you want to monitor.

This is going to vary from project to project, and from industry to industry. In software development, you may track the number of features implemented. In construction, storeys built. In advertising, storyboards produced. In IT upgrades, machines completed.

None of these measure the amount of work – they measure something that has been done. They measure an output of that work.

My point is that you need to:

• monitor something useful.
• monitor the project, not the individuals.
• monitor more than one indicator.
• monitor what you actually want.
• monitor your monitoring.

Why?

• You need to monitor something with really shows you how you are doing. The indicator should be relevant to getting to success. It would be much easier to monitor hours worked, time elapsed, and so on, but these don’t actually tell you if you are any closer to success!
• Indicators shouldn’t be tracked back to an individual, because all that will do is encourage them to find ways to ‘game’ the system. You want your team to be working towards a successful project, not successful indicators of themselves!
• Indicators can too easily become an aim in themselves, meaning other important aspects get ignored. Because of this, you need to make sure you aren’t allowing your delivery to be distorted by what you are monitoring. So, for example, track features implemented, but also track the number of defects. Then there is incentive to get the features done, but not at the expense of lots of defects.
• Following on from that, it is clear that as our team are always, to some extent, going to build what is monitored, make sure you are monitoring what you want to build!
• Monitoring a number of useful indicators means you’ll get an earlier warning if things aren’t going right. But monitoring too many means that your team starts to spend more time monitoring than doing. Get the balance right.

Remember, this is about monitoring progress. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t measure other aspects of the project as well – time elapsed, budget spent, etc. But those measurements are useful in managing the project itself, not in telling you if you are moving towards success.

Hope you’ve found this installment of the Project Management Guide useful. How do you go about measuring progress? What tips do you have to share? Post a comment below!