Statistics show that no matter how hard you try, your project is probably going to fail.
To be a little more specific, only 2.5% of companies complete their projects 100% successfully. Yet the cost of project failures is staggering.
But, the good news is, failure, and how it affects you and your project’s overall success and profitability is controllable. If you can catch, or even predict, failures early enough, you can execute damage control measures and prevent them from completely derailing your project and its profitability. You can even use them to improve your project.
How can you catch or predict failures early?
A project tracker is a snapshot of your entire project. It gives you and the project team a clear picture of how the project is performing, where the weak spots are, and which areas need the most attention.
Following is a list of reason for project failures
1: Lack of transparency
Everyone involved in the project, from the stakeholders and executives right down to the project managers and team members need to know what’s going on in the project. If people can’t see what’s going on, or aren’t kept up-to-date with progress, they lose interest, lose faith, and lose control of the project.
2: Failure to spot warning signs
Projects don’t fail without warning. Missed deadlines, scope changes, lack of engagement from the team, and rising costs are common red flags that are usually raised when something’s not right. If you can’t identify these red flags, you can’t do anything about them – until it’s too late and the project has failed.
3: Inadequate resource allocation
Improper resource allocation is the reason why 10% of projects fail. If you can’t see what your team is working on or how they’re performing against the project goals, you can’t possibly know how or where to allocate resources to ensure deadlines and expectations are met.
4: Lack of structure
Your project is like a journey. The structure of your project is therefore like a map that provides direction and keeps you on the right track. You may encounter some unforeseen stops or diversions, but a good structure will get you to your end destination. Without it, you’ll get lost in project failure.
A project management process like this will give you and your project a solid structure to work from. It’s your map. It will help you plan, set-up, and work through your essential project management tasks and ensure you don’t miss any vital steps during the execution of your project.
A good project tracker gives you a top-level insight into every aspect of the project.
It provides a level of transparency that allows you to analyze and measure performance, monitor time spent on tasks, spot potential problems, and track progress towards end-goals.
With one quick glance, a project tracker will enable you to:
Immediately establish the status of the tasks within your project; what’s behind, what’s on track, and what’s teetering on the edge of failure
Instantly spot budding issues and fix them
Effortlessly update team members and stakeholders with deadlines and goals
It doesn’t matter whether your team is experienced or you’ve just finished onboarding them. Problems and issues have nowhere to hide with a project tracker.
Are project trackers really necessary?
- “Some may ask why tracking project progress is even necessary. After all, it can seem like an administrative overhead” *
This is very true.
But also completely wrong.
While I can’t deny that keeping track of projects can be seen as nothing more than an ‘administrative overhead’ by some, I’m a firm believer that a project tracker is an essential tool to have if you want your project to be a success.
Let’s look at it in another way. Check out the below, eyewatering, statistics:
- 30% of projects fail due to poor communication
- One-third of projects fail due to lack of senior management involvement in crucial project decisions
- 59% of U.S. workers say communication is their project team’s biggest obstacle to success
- 29% of companies say that accountability is the biggest contributor to failure
- 33% of projects fail because of a lack of involvement from senior management or stakeholders
How do you think organizations could improve each one of these statistics?
You guessed it – by using a project tracker.
My experience with these trackers were mostly good, but also tedious. I’d manually fill out each project tracker and run-through it with the project team and stakeholders on a weekly basis (or whatver’s necessary)
Everyone knew where the project was at. We could all see the status of each task. We were able to spot the issues before they became issues, and we knew which areas of the project were over-stretched and needed extra help.
They were a great way to keep track of where the projects were in terms of goals and budget, and also to make sure everyone was clear on progress and performance.
But my God, they were painfully long and laborious documents to fill out each week!
While there’s nothing wrong with creating a Word or Google Doc and manually updating it to track the progress of your projects, it can be an inefficient use of time and it can lead to inaccuracies.
These days, there are so many intuitive pieces of software, platforms, and tools that you can use to easily and accurately track the progress of your projects.
Choose tools that integrate
Integrations are connections between tools that automate the transfer of data.
For example, you might want to integrate your emails with Trello so you can automatically create Trello cards (tasks) out of emails and cut down on copy/pasting. Another example could be automatically uploading certain Dropbox files to Asana, saving you time moving files around.
If you find yourself doing a lot of data entry, or updating multiple apps with the same information, integrations are sure to solve that issue.
Basecamp, ClickUp, Asana and Teamwork have a similar wide library of integrations, plus Zapier functionality.
For a big list of PM tools that integrate, check Zapier’s guide out here.