Tracking Status and Managing Project Activities

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
-Henry Ford

Once work has begun on a project, ensuring that everything is actually getting done becomes incredibly important. Depending on the complexity, length, and number of people on each task, this process can be difficult. Issues can appear faster than they can be resolved. You can quickly lose site of the "big picture" and vier of coarse. This section focuses various facets of managing the progress of a project. The topics include developing metrics and controls, meetings, dealing with changes in scope, and staying focused, motivated and celebrating success.

Topics in this section

Meetings: An Excellent Tool When Used Correctly

Can meetings successfully work to help team members solve problems and keep the project on track? Or will they be those dreaded things that waste time and take a person away from the tasks they need to complete?

Celebrating Successes: The Power Of Compliments

(by Bill Lampton Ph.D.)

During the daily toil of working on a project, its easy to forget to celebrate the team's successes. Compliments go a long way to build moral, motivate, and reassure everyone that they are doing the right things.

Project-Aligned Collaboration

(by Gerd Schmidt)

Many companies are using collaboration in their quest to become more efficient and ‘leaner’. Business demands that people collaborate within companies (intra-company) and across company boundaries (inter-company) with suppliers, customers, etc. Collaboration happens where there are two or more people that want to reach the same target and need work together to exchange information and complete tasks to achieve the goal.

Monitor and Control: Your Project Management Dashboard

(by Bryan Brandenburg)

If you’ve done the proper planning and you follow the plan, you will be heading in the right direction at approximately the right speed. But because of the human factor, you’ll get off course or behind schedule on a regular basis. Your job as project manager should be to carefully monitor and control your project every day.

Additional Resources

• TaskComplete - Project Management Tracking Software
• 35 Surefire Ways to Kill a Meeting
• How to Lead Effective Meetings
• Quality Meetings: Cornerstone To A Quality Improvement Effort
• Stand-up Meeting Antipatterns
• Software by the Numbers: An Aerial View of the Software Metrics Landscape
• Process for Project Monitoring and Control
• A Software Metrics Primer