Project Management Series: Trackers
Welcome back to the project management documentation series where we will be discussing the important documents you will need for your project.
Today we will be focusing on the most important trackers you should set up for any project once you have set up all your important initial documents (click here to visit previous blog).
These are your resource and budget trackers. It is important have these set up so you can properly manage your resource and budget and if any questions are asked you can instantly refer to them and be calm in the knowledge everything is well documented. They will also help feed into your plans as understanding your resources time and project budget will be factored into project planning decisions.
Resource Tracker
When you first start your project and are looking to plan out the activities and timelines, you need to look at your resource. It is beneficial to have an initial understanding of their availability but also continually update this tracker to potentially shift plans or change focus.
The initial information you should gather is to know what else your resources are working on, how many hours a week can they actually spend on this particular project, are their times that they will be less available, due to the time of year for the industry or department or do they have any planned holidays. This helps feed into who will focus on what and when that will be, this is vital for resource allocation and establishing project timelines.
Once you have done this at the start of the project, don’t stop there you need to continually review and update this tracker as things change, you may find some resources have more or less time, or tasks take longer to carry out than expected.
A way of doing this is having a master resource tracker to show your initial information and have an overall detailed outlook on your resource and their time. Then have individual trackers for each resource. Yes, everybody hates a timesheet but the point of them is to understand how long things actually take and how much everyone is doing to determine if it is manageable. Key thing is to empathise to the team that this isn’t a way of micro managing or looking at how long you spend on things, it is there to understand how much you can feasibly do, are you overrun, do you have capacity for more, then as the project manager you can move around tasks to make sure your project moves smoothly and on time but also that the resource are not overworked or underworked, which will inevitably cause delays.
They can be as detailed as you like but best to include the project or sub-project, task, date, time spent.
Budget Tracker
Set up your budget tracker early on and if any money is spent for the project, however small, enter it straight away, this way you won’t miss anything, and you will understand where all the budget is going and highlight sooner if you are getting close to your limit.
Prepopulate the spread sheet with your initial costs and you can even add costs that haven’t happened as estimated so you know they are coming, then change the status when they are done.
A budget tracker will give you piece of mind that there are no hidden costs happening and make sure you continue to stay on budget.
So here you have your trackers, all of our documents are now set up and we are ready to start talking about the exciting part: planning!
Speak then
Auf Wiedersehen,
Anna