When managing projects, seasoned managers are all too aware of the importance of continuous project trackers.
Taking your eye off a particular project for even a few days can risk any and all constraints overrunning severely, after all.
This explains why every project management tool contains tracking reports, be it a task, expense, fund allocation, or even vacancies/gaps between running and pending projects. Besides ensuring the project in question stays on track, a project progress tracker also warns you of extensions and threats.
Despite the plethora of tools and dashboards, it’s wise to get the basics right and play around with a project tracker excel template. This brings us to how a project management dashboard looks like in an excel program. Keep scrolling!
Project management dashboard in excel
Excel’s claim to fame in project management is the diversity of formula. The trouble though, is that spreadsheets can be altered to such an extent that tracking changes, while possible, can be exceedingly time-consuming.
What’s more, the sheet should mimic a project management dashboard such that you are able to understand what a project manager looks at when assessing data. A project tracker is remarkably easy to create, edit and return to at any point in time. And here are some of the features you can expect to see in one;
Project tracking
Essentially, the parameters of a project tracking tool revolve around activities listed in the work breakdown structure, which is further fragmented into tasks.
Tracking tasks lets users see which tasks began early, on time or late, and consequently, the effect it has on their finish times.
This measure lets you improve project time management by building a schedule that is not only comprehensive but has resources who are competent, knowledgeable, and available for the entire duration of work at hand.
Task
The tasks are recorded to break the project down to the essentials. Besides identifying the type of project and resources needed to be allocated to it, a systematic order to tasks ensures that no activity is left out accidentally.
Read More: How to Measure Different Types of Resource Utilization
Task type
The type of task identifies priorities before assigning them to generic resources.
Status
This column lets users know if the task has just been created, assigned, done, removed, due, or past their due date.
Priority
Task priorities make recording it simpler and more effective. It assigns a weighting to each task in the list and pushes high and medium priority tasks first so that less time is wasted.
Assignee
The assignee column refers to the staff member who will take up the task and remain accountable for its progress. The allotment is based on skills, experience, department, and location.
Assigned date
This date marks the allocation of a task to a particular staff in order to generate realistic timelines and effort estimates.
Deadlines
Task deadlines are intended to alert project and resource managers alike of delays and bottlenecks that force the next tasks in line to be pushed back further.
Estimated hours
Planned hours are an approximation of the number of hours a task is estimated to take and forms an integral part of the best project management excel templates.
Start date
Post assignment, the start date is the date work begins.
Expected end date
The plausible end date is b
ased on the total number of estimated hours and this is the timeframe by which a task’s status should change from due to done.
Percentage done
The project progress tracker’s cornerstone lies in the percentage done, which gives users an indication of how much is done versus how much remains. It is a visual representation of the task’s progress.
Actual hours
These hours are the actual available hours utilized by resources while working on a specific task. Depending on the task’s scale of complexity and time, these hours can be longer or shorter than the estimated hours.
Read More: What is Resource Capacity Planning? An Ultimate Guide for Every Project Manager
With this preview of the project tracker template’s workings, you can take that leap of faith you’ve been considering. Even better, you’ll know what part of this database is managed more intuitively by a resource management tool, thus giving you the best of both worlds; one where you get the basics right, and another where you save time crunching data and acting on the results a sophisticated tool generates instantly!
