How does one track your projects
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
Any project manager works with four variables: cost, timing, duration and quality. A more challenging goal is to enchance business procedures and resource allocation. Most projects employ such recourses as people, money, and tools to deliver something of value and meet objectives. You may come across a lot of contributing factors that are very important for effective project management. A few of them can be found below:
- Goal setting and reviewing progress.
- Dealing with risk. Take any project and you will see that it contains a lot of uncertainties that should be accounted for.
- Choosing labor and equipment for the project.
- Having a clear idea about the product you want to get when the project is finished.
- Controlling what is going on: assigning jobs, supervising the work-in-progress.
- Making sure that the products of the project are of satisfactory quality.
- Dealing with change. Everything changes. When you start out on the project, you should forsee how it will evolve with time.
- Communicating with project stakeholders.
To manage these components you can use pencil and paper or perhaps a spreadsheet program. But you get some interesting advantages if you go for project tracking software:
- It simplifies scheduling. (more…)