How to Track and Analyze Projects

Tracking is the process for measuring project status and comparing it with the project plan to identify variances and take corrective actions. This process is repeated over the course of a project, allowing you to control and monitor project progress and cost. You can also use tracking information to generate project status reports. Tracking consists of reviewing information on actuals.

For example, the actual start and finish dates, the actual duration of tasks, the actual time worked by resources, and the actual cost of the project. Tracking also provides information about tasks in progress and those tasks that have been completed.

To ensure efficient monitoring of a project, make the lowest level of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) represent small amounts of work. Use milestones to indicate significant events and mark progress. To monitor a project closely, you must be able to spot problems and trends that develop during the project's life cycle in time to do something about them. Periodic evaluations of your project data can help you pinpoint problems as they arise, letting you initiate the necessary corrective actions to bring the project back on target. In instances where the word analysis is used, it signifies the review, examination, investigation, and evaluation of project data to:

Deviations are differences between expectations and actuality, including variances that are traditionally used by project managers to compare planned and actual performance. Open Workbench incorporates a number of field names that you can use in views to produce the analysis project managers require to track work performance, spot trouble areas, and account for cost and schedule variances.

The list of field names in the View Definition dialog contains many calculated variance elements and performance indices, and several field names that you can use in an analysis to signal potential trouble. For example, Critically Late?. Use these fields in views to identify tasks with deviations.