Enterprise software projects are difficult to manage under certain circumstances. Project managers should spend a significant amount of time in anticipating problems, planning, tracking, monitoring, controlling and resolving all the project issues and risks to ensure the success of enterprise IT projects.
It’s important to monitor the progress of the project to know if any modifications need to be made to get back on the track. Keeping your team updated with the latest changes and keeping an audit trail for stakeholders are the two crucial things that helps in successful project management.
To keep a track on projects, enterprises should have a robust timesheet system to manage project phases. Choosing an appropriate timesheet system is important. The project members should be trained on the use of the software. Project members should weekly fill the timesheet for each deliverable with milestones.
Tips to track and monitor the project progress:
- Always keep a record of actual vs. standard
Recording actual time spent or efforts save from the upcoming troubles. Project manager should track important data items like the lines of code, GUI screens, user stories and other units that could create problems in future.
- Create inch-pebbles to track project state
Create inch-pebbles for tracking the state of the project. Break down the larger tasks into smaller pieces and estimate the time for each smaller task. Count the task as complete only when its 100% complete. Project status tracking should be based on the tasks that are completed and their size not the percentage completion of task.
- Tracking projects honestly
As a project manager, create a culture in which team members feel safe for them to report project status accurately. The project must be executed on the basis of exact data-based facts instead of ambiguous information. Size, effort, time, quality and status are the five major areas of software measurement. Define few metrics in each of these categories to take corrective actions when necessary. Managing project effectively becomes easy when you really know what is done and what isn’t done, what are the risks that need to be tackled, problems need to be solved.
In order to deliver project successfully, having ways to check on your progress and take a note of where things are at is important.
