From the course: Project Management Simplified

How to monitor project progress

From the course: Project Management Simplified

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How to monitor project progress

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- How do you know whether your project is still on target to deliver on time, or has it already started to go a little bit late? The answer, and it's the only way to know how it's going is step nine of my 12-step process. And it is to color in your Gantt chart to monitor your progress against your plan. Color in what you've done and make sure you're keeping up with the today line, which moves relentlessly across the page. This is one of the quickest and easiest parts of project management. And yet, often, people don't do it. They make a lovely big Gantt chart to impress their customer, or persuade their boss to let them do the project, and then they file it away and never use it again. What a shame, when the coloring in is so quick and so useful. And the alternative is not good at all. If you don't have a plan or if you have plan but you don't monitor your progress against it, you won't know where you are until you get almost to the end. And then once the finish date is in sight you suddenly realize that you're not going to make it. I think of it as if you're running a marathon. You come around the corner and you see the finish, and then you look at your watch and you think, "Oh no, I've only got one minute left "and the finish is still a mile away. "I'll never finish within my planned time." Or at least it's incredible expensive and stressful to finish within your planned time. It's much better to have milestones along the way and then you know you're okay and you feel good. Or you know you're slightly off the pace and you've got plenty of time to catch up. You only need to speed up by a small percentage to get back onto track. Or you can tell your customer well in advance that you're going to be late. Rather than giving them a last minute surprise, which is never popular. You can see on this diagram that I'm not keeping up with the today line, I'm way behind the plan. I haven't even got the permit, let alone started buying the site. And I'm behind on finding the site and getting my manager. While on this one, I am keeping up with the line which is what I want to see. So if I only had one minute to check on your project, if I only had time to ask you one question, my question would be, "Can I have a look at your colored in Gantt chart?" The only alternate to a colored in Gantt chart is where I ask you how it's going and you tell me stories. "Oh yes, we found a really nice building. "It took ages I thought we were never "going to find somewhere decent, "but look here's a photo," which takes much longer and is less useful. Because it tells me what you've done but not what you should've done by now. You found a building, that's great, but maybe you should've bought it by now. Are you where you should be? "I don't know." But with a colored in Gantt it's instantly clear. So the process is that you have a meeting, usually once a month, but for a shorter project it might be once a week, and you color in the bars. For a long bar you might color in some of it, maybe with the help of what I call a sub-Gantt, you might have a more detailed local plan for just that task. For example, modify building on our high-level plan, might have a whole detailed plan behind it which allows us to color in just the first part of that long bar. And then for any parts of the project that are lagging behind, particularly if it's on the critical path, we can start thinking about how we're going to catch back up. So that's step nine, coloring in to monitor progress. And I think you'll agree that for all of your projects, you definitely need to have a colored in Gantt chart.

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