Tracking & Reporting

Tracking performance against plans is an essential discipline for the project manager. It enables the PM to confirm that all aspects of the plan are being followed, and to determine whether any variance is within allowable variation.

Reporting is the means of communicating the project status to all interested parties. It must be relevant and just sufficient in detail for each specific audience.

Tracking and reporting what?

Detailed progress and cost information should be collected in a standard way for all work products. This is often done at the task level by booking time against specific tasks which are shown on the detail plan for a work product. This information may be shown as actual duration against the planned task duration on a Gantt chart.

The Product Breakdown Structure may be used as a guide for pulling progress information together, so that it can be summarised to the top level products and for the project as a whole.