Project tracking means closely following progression of work to ensure that the project is being done according to the plan and that it is consistent with the requirements. Project tracking software helps you supervise project activities in progress to ensure project consistency with the business objectives and performance targets.

Why track progress

As a project manager, you may feel overwhelmed with all those things that you have to track and supervise to make your project consistent and efficient. Obviously you have to monitor such things as budget, schedule, performance, communications, and much more. For instance, by tracking the project budget you control resource usage and avoid over-allocation. When you supervise teams and collaborative activities you can measure group performance and understand whether teamwork is efficient.

Tracking lets you gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of every project activity, and then you can use this valued data to leverage improvement opportunities, resolve current issues and eliminate risks. This process helps you understand whether your project is being performed in line with the requirements.

In this context, the purpose of the tracking process is to ensure that a project or its separate activity follows a predefined plan and that requirements are met. In case something is wrong with the project or its separate activity, the process should help identify the gap and provide necessary information for further decision making.

Among other reasons for tracking project progress are the following ones:

• Possibility to disclose troubles early and explore improvement opportunities
• Improved change control and management
• Measuring and analyzing project performance

It is an important rule that you are consistent in tracking your project activities. And project tracking software will help you follow this rule. Such software allows you to reveal performance gaps and understand whether the project plan and requirements are consistently followed.

How to track progress

In order to succeed in delivering your project, you need to understand how to track the project and what items need to be monitored. Also you need to know what project tracking software is best to use.

Here are the key points you should monitor and track in your project:

• Tasks. Track time and cost to reveal tasks that are delayed or out of budget.
• Changes. Review all changes occurred in the project to explore current unsolved issues and take corrective actions.
• Feedback. Establish and use employee feedback to adjust current and future team behaviors.
• Performance. Keep watch on the percentage of time and tasks to ensure desired performance and avoid overload.

You can use CentriQS project tracking solution to monitor and supervise your projects by tasks, performance, changes and feedback. This solution lets you ensure consistency of your projects with the business objectives and requirements.

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Tracking with CentriQS

CentriQS lets you create and store your project data in one database file. Besides, all information about related tasks, schedules, employees, files, documents is kept in the same place, so it will be easier for you to find and track necessary data. For example, you create and customize dashboards to display required data (e.g. projects, related tasks, and related files) on one screen.

The program features the Projects view in which you can track all of your projects in one list. Each project has a number of default properties, including "Name", "Code", "Date Created", "Folder", "Links". If needed, new custom properties (for example "Deadline") can be added. You can use default and custom properties to track your projects in the Projects view.

CentriQS keeps log of all changes made to any entity including project. This capability lets you view what changes are made to a particular project and what users made those changes. The History tab shows all of the changes in chronological order. If needed, you can add some comments regarding one or another project change; then other users will read your comments and leave their feedback in the History tab.

Finally, you can use CentriQS to analyze project performance by a number of measures. The software lets use OLAP cube data to create and visualize pivot tables. For example, in the Project Analytics view you track overall and individual time performance of your projects by the fields "Estimate", "Remain", "Actual" and "Deviation". This analytic data can be used in creating reports and building charts.

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