Every project manager is expected to monitor the success of their project – often whilst it is still underway. Finding ways of measuring success is never as simple as it might appear. A multi-pronged approach to success evaluation is the best way to understand just how well your team performs.
Keeping To A Schedule Matters
Perhaps the simplest way to monitor a project’s success is to assess whether you and your team are keeping to a predetermined schedule. As long as you trust the quality of your team’s work, their adherence to realistic scheduling goals is a good indication of how many hiccups they are encountering along the way.
Setting realistic and understandable goals is very important if you want to measure any kind of success by investigating how well your team is keeping to a schedule. If a schedule is unrealistic, failing to meet it won’t mean a thing!
Feedback And Communication
Collecting feedback from your team and your audience is absolutely crucial during any project. This used to be one of the most challenging aspects of project management before the proliferation of project management apps. Project management apps like Monday allow project leaders to keep track of feedback and communications from a central hub and adjust goals accordingly. A good project manager should have an empathetic understanding of an individual’s issues that can affect the success of the team. Understanding is the quickest way to finding a solution.
Keep A Track Of Online Interactions
Online interactions with the project you are managing can give some indication as to its success. Metrics such as page hits can be measured and assessed. Analytical software can be used to tell exactly where in the world a page hit has come from. This can be very useful for monitoring, as the location of page visitors or interactors can be measured against the target audiences and location-based goals of your organization.
The field of web cartography deals with the mapping of online interactions. The effects of this new field are already being felt in business.
The Bottom Line: Profit
The organization likely has one goal that stands head and shoulders over their other objectives: generating profit. Probably the easiest metric of project success is profit. Unfortunately, this is not always a metric that is available to a project manager. The benefits of a completed project are often not felt immediately, so an increase or decrease in profits will not necessarily reflect the success of a project.
Regular Quality Reviews
Good project management practice involves the inherent planning of quality. This, however, does not mean that quality reviews are not an essential method for measuring success and keeping your project on track. Standards can very easily slip – especially when team members are confronted with impossible schedules and goals. Quality reviews can help you identify problems in your initial planning, issues with task designation, and successes that your team has achieved.