How to track team progress effectively in Project Management

No matter how well-thought-out a project plan is, setbacks happen. One trait that makes you stand out as a project manager is your team project tracking skills and ability to navigate mishaps, track your team’s progress effectively, and ensure they deliver results on time. 

The last thing you want as a project manager is for you or your stakeholders to lose track of the project’s progress and fall behind schedule. 

Tracking your team’s progress throughout the project’s lifecycle will help you make the right informed decisions at each stage and ensure your team’s deliverables align with the organization's overall goals. 

In this post, we will explore some of the best strategies for effectively tracking your team’s progress.

TL;DR

• Some common issues that arise in team project tracking are unclear objectives, inconsistent communication, scope creep, and ineffective data collection. These issues can negatively affect team progress if not managed properly.
• Establishing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals and assigning specific roles ensures collaborators and stakeholders remain accountable  and actively involved throughout the project.
• Use both quantitative and qualitative tracking methods, conduct regular update meetings, and maintain comprehensive documentation to identify and address potential issues early.
• Luna integrates progress-tracking, risk mitigation, communication and documentation to make sure stakeholders stay informed of progress, blockers and key changes throughout the project's lifecycle, for better alignment and transparency.

Common problems in team project tracking

Project managers often face various challenges when tracking team progress. These issues range from simple ones that can be resolved in a few minutes to more complex ones that may cause serious delays to the project’s timeline. 

Here are some common challenges related to team project tracking. 

Unclear objectives

When the goals and objectives are not crystal clear to all collaborators and stakeholders, project managers risk scope creep, which is when unauthorized changes are made to the project’s original objectives. If you are not certain of your objectives, it becomes hard even to know what metrics to track or monitor. 

Inconsistent communication

Consistent communication plays a major role in the success of any project. Without timely communication from collaborators and stakeholders, it will be difficult to have a correct idea of how the project is progressing. It also creates confusion around important aspects of the project, like timelines, deliverables, and responsibilities. 

Scope creep

As mentioned earlier, a sudden change in the scope of a project can cause many issues, from budget and resource requirements to timeline and human resource availability. This can lead to a serious delay or possible cancellation of the project. 

Ineffective data collection

Data is king in project management. Not consistently collecting accurate data leaves room for confusion and the sharing of inaccurate information. A structured data-collection process can prevent many issues from occurring. 

No risk management

Project managers must perform a thorough risk analysis to spot possible problems that may occur during the project and implement strategies to mitigate them. Failure to do this leaves room for a myriad of issues that may be detrimental to the project’s progress. 

Tip: As a project manager, your team project tracking skills are as good as the tools you use. You need a tool that showcases important metrics to provide a clear picture of the project's progress. A good team progress tracking tool should also easily integrate with project milestone software, allowing project management automation and team project collaboration.

With Luna, you can track your team's progress in real-time so you always have an accurate picture of how the project is going. Luna allows for multiple integrations, such as: 

• Project/task management tools like Jira, Asana or ClickUp
• Communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams
• Documentation tools like Google Docs, Microsoft Word or Slides and 
• Tracking tools like Google Sheets, CSV, or Excel. 

With all these tools in one place, you will always know how your team is progressing and be able to fix any issues that arise on time before they become critical. Try Luna for free today.  

How do you monitor team progress? (10 tips)

The following team project tracking tips will help you monitor your team’s progress and ensure that everything runs smoothly from ideation to project completion. 

1. Set SMART goals and milestones

Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals to help your team deliver and ensure they are concise. The clearer your goals and milestones are, the easier team project tracking will be. Discuss with your team and stakeholders and break down your goals into easily achievable milestones that work for all collaborators. Ensure that everyone is comfortable with the timeline attached to each milestone and that they know what their deliverables are. The milestones will serve as checkpoints for you to determine whether the project is going according to plan or if you need to make some adjustments. 

2. Assign responsibilities

Sometimes, team members can try to avoid accountability by claiming they weren’t aware of their responsibilities. It is best not to assume that everyone knows what they should be doing and assign clear responsibilities on your project’s dashboard where the entire team can see who is responsible for what. Since you will likely have dependencies, all collaborators and stakeholders must know who to hold accountable if the project is not moving at a healthy pace. 

3. Keep stakeholders involved

Stakeholder involvement in your project's progress should not be a one-time thing. You should keep them involved at different key stages of the project. This helps keep you accountable and also manages their expectations, as they will know exactly what to expect when the project is completed. 

Tip: Luna helps with stakeholder alignment and keeping them in sync with the project’s progress. Luna lets you create customized views so each stakeholder can only see relevant information without being bombarded with all aspects of the project. You can also automate key changes and update the stakeholders on any changes via Slack or any other communication tool right on Luna. Try Luna for free today. 

4. Keep comprehensive documentation

It is so common for project status reports, plans, risk registers, etc., to be scattered across various channels like chats, emails, threads, and spreadsheets, making it almost impossible to track every single update. It is important to keep all documentation related to a project in one centralized unit and provide access to relevant collaborators and stakeholders. Consolidating all project documentation in one location also makes it easy for you to access information on the go without having to ask different stakeholders or team members for access or go from slides to docs to try to find important information. 

5. Schedule project update meetings regularly

Regular project update meetings provide deeper insight into how your team is progressing more than what the documents or back and forth emails, or Slack messages reveal. Team members are able to share their progress and the status of their assigned tasks and also ask important questions. As a project manager, you can use this opportunity to identify any red flags that could affect the project timeline and devise a strategy to avoid a full-blown problem. Depending on the overall timeline of the project, you can conduct quick weekly or monthly catch-up meetings where everyone discusses what they are working on and if they are experiencing any hurdles. 

Tip: Luna helps project managers drastically reduce the time spent on preparing these update meetings by automatically tracking progress and changes in a user friendly interface that stakeholders can check beforehand. This way, meetings are only focused on high-value, critical discussions such as risk resolution paths.

6. Choose your preferred progress tracking method

How well you track your team’s progress largely depends on the project-tracking method you use. You should use both qualitative and quantitative project tracking methods to provide a full view of the status of your project at all times. 

• Quantitative tracking methods focus on numerical metrics like milestones, cost, and time. 
• Qualitative tracking methods track progress using metrics like survey data, stakeholder feedback, team meeting notes, feedback, etc. 

Both methods are very important. Quantitative metrics provide hardcore data to share with your shareholders with no human bias. In contrast, Qualitative metrics provide more insight into why the project is at a certain stage, highlighting possible bottlenecks. 

7. Use the best project progress tracking tools

A good project tracking software removes all the manual labor from team progress tracking. These tools can help you monitor your team’s progress, view updates, communicate with stakeholders, and see how well you’re moving towards your goals all on one platform. There are several project progress tracking tools available with different capabilities. For example, some tools have more features than others, and your choice will depend on your core priorities. 

Luna integrates with various tasks, documentation, and communication tools like Jira, Asana, Slack, Sheets, Google Docs, etc., so you can track your team’s progress on one platform. See how Luna can help you stay on top of your project. 

8. Involve your team in progress tracking

As a project manager, it is not always easy to involve the entire team in progress tracking, but it can make your job much easier. Since you will always have to communicate with collaborators and get updates on their progress to report to leadership, they must be involved. The best way to achieve this is to get them involved from the start of the project and explain why it is important. They need to see the value in progress tracking as an important metric that showcases their success. 

9. Report progress consistently

Create a simple guideline for progress reporting that team members can easily understand and use. This is important because you don’t want inconsistent and inaccurate reporting by collaborators, which could lead you to make misinformed decisions. Your project progress report guideline or template should highlight specific metrics or KPIs that your team members should focus on while reporting their progress. Ensure that all team members use these KPIs for uniformity and easy understanding. The individual reports from your team will help you create a more comprehensive and detailed progress report that you can share with leadership or stakeholders. 

10. Don’t overlook client satisfaction

While tracking your team’s progress, ensure to prioritize client satisfaction. This is particularly important for cumbersome projects that span long periods. You should share the team’s progress at pivotal points of the project with your clients and note their feedback. Waiting until project completion to share your progress with clients can be unfavorable, especially if the clients have issues with the final result. You can host meetings with clients every month or quarter to share the current progress and learn their feedback. Another method is to send satisfaction surveys to clients and ask them to rate your work so far. 

Wrapping up

Team project tracking is not micromanaging, but an efficient way to ensure the project is moving at the right pace with all collaborators and stakeholders actively engaged. To meet your proposed timeline, you must ensure every deliverable or milestone is ticked off by the associated deadline, and progress tracking will showcase whether you are on the right track or not. 

Following the best practices for team progress tracking shared in this post will help you maintain a clear overview of your project's progress and highlight potential issues so you can fix them before they become critical.