Project monitoring is an important aspect of project management. As a project manager, you want to ensure that everything goes according to the plan.
Monitoring the project you’re managing makes you see the hurdles that might affect the project. With this, you are able to overcome them before they occur or find a way to avert them.
There are some key aspects of project management that require close monitoring in order to ensure the successful accomplishment of the project. In this article, we explain the key aspects of project monitoring.
What is Project Monitoring?
Project monitoring is how a project manager tracks the project’s metrics, progress and activities to ensure that everything is completed on time. It helps in assessing a project’s success or failure.
This aspect of project management is an ongoing process.
Benefits of Project Monitoring
Why should you monitor your project? It’s easier to just trust the team and move on, right?
No. It is better and essential to be part of the whole process. Your role as a project manager is incomplete without project monitoring. Let’s see some of the importance of project monitoring.
1. Early identification of issues
By continuously monitoring the project’s progress, you are able to identify potential problems from the initial plan early, which would help avoid significant issues. If you stubbornly go with the initial project plan, and assume that project monitoring is a waste of time, you are in for some significant problem.
2. Up-to-date information
Regular project monitoring promotes effective communication with team members and stakeholders. You get to communicate with the team and have up-to-date information about the project’s progress. Suspend the project monitoring till the end? You’ll miss out on a lot.
3. Performance assessment and evaluation
Monitoring the project’s progress facilitates the evaluation of team performance. You can easily tell who is doing it right and who isn’t. And necessary adjustments can be made.
These are just some of the benefits of monitoring a project’s progress. Skipping the project monitoring part would affect the project’s progress. You definitely don’t want that.
Now let’s see the key aspects of project monitoring.
Budget
One of the most important elements of project management is monitoring the money spent on a project. Every project has a budget. Budget monitoring can be done by observing how the cost of each activity differs from the proposed cost. This allows for adjustments if the project is running over budget.
Though this might seem trivial to large organizations as they often run over budget, it is quite the opposite when managing, say a charity project. Monitoring the budget becomes fundamental when managing a project using donated funds.
Time
Monitoring timelines is specifically important if the project involves building something for a particular occasion. In this instance, the deadline is definite and there can’t be an extension. A project manager can evaluate progress against the proposed deadline by using milestones.
Resources and scheduling
Every project has its peculiar resources. These resources can be monitored and adjusted as things change. A project manager constantly reassigns tasks and resources based on the situation and resources available at certain times.
In conclusion,
Being flexible is an essential and handy quality of a project manager. The original plan may contain unrealistic objectives. Staying adamant about the original plan may lead to a poor result. The best decision, sometimes, is to make adjustments to ensure the successful accomplishment of the project. Again, project monitoring is not to be done at the beginning or the end alone. It is a continuous process. See it to the end and save your team a lot of stress.
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