Are you routinely asking the employees who work for your company to complete projects for you? If so, you need to make sure that you come up with a way to track project progress.
If you don’t do this, your employees might take longer than you would like to make any project progress. Or worse, they might start working on a project with the wrong end goals in mind and fail to put forward their best project performance.
To avoid these scenarios, you should come up with a surefire way to track project progress. We’ve come up with a list of things that you can do to keep your company’s projects on the right track at all times.
Take a look at the steps you should be taking throughout the course of a project below.
Ask Your Employees to Begin by Creating an Outline for a Project
At the very beginning of a project, you should ask the employees who will be working on it to generate an outline for it. This outline should lay out the different steps that your employees will take during the project.
An outline is going to help both you and your employees in a variety of ways. It’ll ensure that you’re all on the same page as far as what a project should entail. It’ll also indicate how your employees are going to complete a project over the course of several days, weeks, or even months.
Work With Your Employees to Come Up With Goals for a Project
Every project is going to have an end goal. This goal will be whatever it is that you want your employees to accomplish when they’re all finished with a project.
But that shouldn’t be the only goal associated with a project. There should also be a series of smaller goals that your employees should strive to reach between the start and end of a project.
These goals should help to make a project more manageable for your employees. They’ll also make it so much easier for you to keep tabs on how close your employees are to reaching their end goal.
Set Deadlines for Each of the Different Aspects of a Project
You’re probably going to provide your employees with a deadline for their entire project. That will be the day when you’ll want to see that they’re completely finished with the project.
But just like with goals, you don’t want to have a single deadline at the end of a project and have it be the only deadline. You also want to use the goals that they come up with to create other deadlines for them.
Ideally, there should be a deadline associated with each goal on their outline. This will, once again, make it simpler for them to hit their final goal and deadline without a problem.
Hold Regular Meetings With Your Employees to Track Project Progress
Once you have a series of goals and deadlines for your employees to work with, you should arrange to hold regular meetings with them to track project progress. You can have these meetings every day, every week, every other week, every month, or whatever works best for you.
During these meetings, your employees should provide you with an update on how their project is going. They should tell you whether or not they have reached the goals they were supposed to reach and reveal how things are coming along.
These meetings will make your employees feel a little bit more accountable than they would otherwise. They’ll feel almost like a performance review to them in a lot of ways.
Help Your Employees Troubleshoot Any Problems With a Project
There is always a chance that your employees might run into problems while working on a project that will prevent them from accomplishing their goals. If this is the case, you should try to be as understanding as you can be.
You should also lend a helping hand to them and talk to them about how to troubleshoot their problems. You should be able to come up with collective solutions to these problems if you all put your minds to them.
Put a Performance Management System Into Place for Your Employees’ Projects
Do you wish there was a way to track project progress seamlessly without having to hunt your employees down all the time? You might want to look into investing in a performance management system.
A successful performance management system will allow you to track project progress without having to do many of the things we just mentioned. It’ll make life easier on both you and your employees and get everyone at your company on the same page when projects need to be done.
Investing in a project management system will require you to spend some money. But it’ll be well worth it in the end when you see just how effective it can be.
You Can Track the Progress of a Project by Taking These Steps
Regardless of whether you have a small or big business, you’re going to have numerous projects going on all the time. Keeping up with each of them is going to be a real challenge if you don’t know how to go about doing it.
Take each of the steps here to track project progress and keep projects moving along. They should make it possible for you to keep tabs on your employees without having to breathe down their necks 24/7/365.
Find more tips on pulling off successful business projects by browsing through the rest of our blog articles.