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Overview of Monitoring Progress

Author: Sophia

what's covered

This lesson provides an overview of monitoring project progress including:

1. Monitoring Progress
2. Essential Documents

1. Monitoring Progress

The project manager continually compares the ongoing progress of a project to the original plan. Adjusting resources assigned to tasks and the project as a whole is the responsibility of the project manager. They also communicate the status of the project to stakeholders and help manage the stakeholders' expectations about deliverables.

A project manager serves as the point of communication, facilitating the open and free-flow of information between team members and establishing expectations for the work.

For a project manager to be effective in this role, though, they must monitor multiple aspects of the project:

Schedule: This includes the time and effort spent on tasks and is watched closely to determine if the original estimates were accurate.
Costs: This includes the person and non-person resources spent on a project
Scope: If too many changes occur early in a project, this is a signal that the project is more complex than originally expected, and project manager should be on high alert to communicate any and all changes to stakeholders.
Risks: If risks can be found and partially, or fully, mitigated before the issue occurs, that will benefit the project.

As you can see, monitoring project progress is the focus of a project manager during this phase of the project since it provides the details that they need to communicate to stakeholders about status.

To monitor the health of a project, the project manager must establish a method to track all the tasks on a project. This monitoring should answer the following questions:

Question	Description
Is the project progressing in terms of deliverables?	Sometimes decisions are not made quickly enough for work to proceed, so the project manager will need to facilitate these decisions.
Is the project progressing to achieve project requirements?	The deliverables must meet expectations, or the project will not be a success.
Is the project schedule on track to complete as planned?	If tasks are slipping early in a project, it's likely the tasks later in the project will slip also.
Is the project within the established project budget?	As with the schedule, early overruns on the budget are difficult to balance later in a project.
Is the project progressing to meet all quality and performance requirements?	If the work is being completed, but the level of quality does not meet the standard outlined in the scope, it's the project manager's role to point this out and address the issue.

term to know

Project Monitoring

The action of measuring project progress against baselines established in the project plan.

2. Essential Documents

To accomplish this level of progress tracking, the project manager relies on a few key documents.

Project scope: Used as the guideline for all project deliverables. The quality and requirements of project deliverables must match what is outlined in the scope.
Project schedule: Created at the end of the planning phase. All project tasks should be compared to this baseline.
Project budget: Used to monitor all resources on a project and to determine if the project cost is on track.

A project manager must create processes that provide a steady flow of information about all of these details.

summary

This lesson provides an overview of how a project manager monitors progress of a project by comparing essential documents to the original plan. Scope, budget, and schedule are among the essential documents used to manage project resources and manage stakeholder expectations.

Source: This work adapted from Sophia Author Jeff Carroll.

Terms to Know

Project Monitoring: The action of measuring project progress against baselines established in the project plan.

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Overview of Monitoring Progress

Table of Contents

1. Monitoring Progress

2. Essential Documents