Harness the Power of Project Tracking Templates: Your Key to Efficient Project Management

Seamless and efficient project tracking and management demand effective organization and oversight. This is particularly crucial when managing multiple projects at once. You must keep tabs on every project, team, process, and task from conception to completion.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), organizations that employ the best project management practices have a success rate of 92% in meeting their objectives. One such practice is using a project tracking template, which offers a centralized hub for monitoring your project.

Project tracking templates allow you to stay on top of every task and project throughout the different phases. For each project, you can view the statuses of individual tasks, pending actions, team assignments, completed deliverables, estimated costs, timesheets, and more.

This approach ensures complete visibility into your projects across different departments and teams, impacting performance, productivity, and delivery. When you can track every project aspect, you can control quality, mitigate potential issues, and fix workflow gaps.

In this post, let’s dive into project tracking templates and how to use them to ensure efficient project management.

The Power of Project Tracking Templates

A tracking template is an integral tool for every project manager, allowing you to monitor progress and stay organized throughout the project’s life. With a template, you get a central platform for all the project’s activities and processes for seamless management and tracking.

Also, you can communicate progress among team members and stakeholders, gain insight into every project, and resolve issues as they arise. With the right project management software, you’re likely to reap different benefits of project tracking templates, including:

Customization & Flexibility

Templates usually have predefined structures, but you can customize and personalize them to suit your unique processes and procedures. This flexibility lets you adapt templates to your project’s workflows and requirements to avoid unnecessary complexity.

For example, you can customize a template to suit your machine fabrication project or product development process. You can add lists, change dates, configure dashboards, and set milestones to make them as detailed as you like.

Time & Cost Savings

With pre-made templates, you don’t need to create templates from scratch when setting up a new project or process. You simply need to spin up your existing templates and adapt them to different projects.

This saves you money and time when planning, designing, and setting up templates. It also reduces the learning curve for your team members and stakeholders; they get to work in a familiar environment to get the project up and running.

Centralized Operations

Traditional project tracking methods involve using multiple solutions and platforms to manage a project. For example, a typical method can use email, documents, spreadsheets, calls, and even texts. This process scatters information across various platforms, resulting in inefficiency.

With a tracking template, everything is centralized and consolidated within the tracker, providing a singular platform for all project-related data, communication, and activities. This ensures all members can access the same information and view their to-dos - keeping the project schedule on-track.

Real-Time Monitoring

Traditional project management processes rely on periodic meetings and manual updates to monitor the progress of a project. Occasionally, such methods result in delays and confusion due to missing or inaccurate data, inconsistent workflow, and increased complexity.

Templates come with dashboards, which contain graphs and visualizations, allowing you to view the status and progress of the project in a single glance. Every action is automatically updated, providing real-time insight for timely interventions and proactive decision-making.

Improved Collaboration

Projects involve different teams, departments, and professionals working together to achieve specific goals and targets. Without a shared platform to connect all the stakeholders, the result is chaos, confusion, and unproductivity.

A project tracking template solves this by connecting silos, teams, and departments, offering a shared platform for communication, file sharing, team assignments, and brainstorming. This provides a historical record for future reference, gets everyone on the same page, and ensures accountability.

Why Use Project Tracking Templates?

Many organizations seek to reap the optimal benefits of project management, though some are unwilling to invest adequately in it. Note that project management can account for up to 20% of the project’s budget.

Interestingly, up to 42% of companies don’t see the need or value of project management, risking a loss of up to 11.4% in resources. So, why use project tracking templates? There are four key reasons you should:

• Customizable: Depending on your project’s needs and requirements, you can customize a template for tasks, processes, or projects. You don’t need a unique template for every new project or task.
• Get a head start: It can be difficult and time-consuming to build templates from scratch when starting a project. A pre-structured template gives an outline that you can adapt to your project, saving time in deciding what and how to track.
• Ensure consistency: Given most project managers oversee two or more projects at any given time, using a template allows you to ensure consistency across your projects and teams. This simplifies and streamlines your work for effective tracking.
• Tick all the boxes: Depending on your industry or job function, most templates come with checklists and a detailed roadmap for your project. Of course, you can edit them as needed, but you get a list of the essential components and tasks you must accomplish.

Complex projects like construction can be detailed, requiring every action, task, and process to be recorded, reviewed, and approved. In such a case, creating templates from scratch for such projects can be overwhelming and costly.

Tracking templates are handy here and bring simplicity to your project management. It’s easy to deploy and customize them, setting your project up for success from the beginning without overhauling your processes.

Showcasing Project Tracking Templates

Tracking templates are available for virtually every task or project. You can download them online for free or access them within your project management tool. For example, Quickbase Exchange is your go-to repository for hundreds of ready-to-use templates and apps.

The library offers a vast collection of templates for different uses and scenarios. For instance, you can opt for a multiple project tracking template if you manage several projects simultaneously. This template lets you centralize the operations of all projects on one platform.

Or, you can opt for a project tracking dashboard template to get a dynamic overview of your project data. At a glance, you can view all the critical details in real time, including project status, budget, team workload, financials, timelines, risks, pending actions, etc.

Though templates vary, here are the essential components and features that most offer:

• Overview section: You get a centralized place for monitoring every aspect of the project, such as timelines, milestones, workloads, etc.
• Workflows: With workflows, you can define your project’s path and highlight the resources you need to complete tasks to achieve the desired results
• Tasks and subtasks: You also get a list of all tasks with their child records and dependencies to ensure a deeper level of tracking. Subtasks make work achievable and manageable to avoid overburdening your team.
• Resource allocation: This feature lets you track team members' availability and workloads, making it easy to shift teams or individuals as needed for improved productivity.
• Dates/Timelines: End and start dates are essential to define timelines for a project schedule and track progress. This allows your team to work within the specified timelines and prioritize urgent tasks.
• Dashboards: A dashboard gives you an overview of all tasks and processes within the template. It also highlights the critical information you need, such as costs, upcoming deadlines, pending actions, notifications, project health, etc.
• Integrations: A good template supports integrations, allowing you to continue to work on other apps or import your data from other sources. For example, you can integrate the template with Google Calendar to track deadlines.
• Risk management: You also get a section that registers all risks and their current status. This makes it simple to implement mitigation strategies to avoid cost and time overruns.
• Reporting: Project reporting is an essential feature of a good template. It lets you generate daily or weekly reports for meetings or team updates. This is essential in fostering continuous improvement.

Note that templates provide even more features to simplify different processes, including views, checklists, charts, portfolios, analytics, etc. You can also use integrations to supplement these features and expand the functionality of your templates.

With effective use of these features, you can standardize your processes and never miss something important while leveraging the project data to drive performance and productivity. This allows you to unlock the full potential of your team to deliver successful projects.

Project Reporting Templates

Throughout the project’s life, you must keep tabs on everything and create reports on different tasks and processes. These reports are essential to managers, investors, clients, and other stakeholders, particularly when making decisions and project adjustments.

In this case, you’ll need a project reporting template to document project changes, status, and progress. Note that you must document every change, whether good or bad. This is vital to provide invaluable insights and information to improve the quality of your deliverables.

With a reporting template, you can schedule daily or weekly status reports, which can be compiled into monthly reports. The report can include milestones, risks, projections, executive summary, issues, and more, depending on the use case.

You can integrate this template with a project reporting dashboard template, which gives an overview of all statuses. It’s simply a data visualization tool that provides status reports and completion percentages of different tasks for easy planning.

The dashboard also provides the management access to tabular and summary reports at any time. They can filter reports across different teams and departments, providing instant access to valuable insights.

Project Management with Quickbase

Projects can be complicated, with different risks, unexpected costs, and wastage to manage. While avoiding these issues is impossible, you can keep them to a minimum by ditching manual, paper-based systems and adopting digital solutions in project management.

Quickbase offers a dynamic work and project management solution to revolutionize how you manage your projects from start to finish. Our no-code platform connects your data, improves team collaboration, and tracks projects to boost productivity and performance. It offers:

• Automation: Quickbase allows you to use automation to eliminate manual errors, reduce repetitive tasks, and streamline workflows.
• An all-in-one platform: You don’t need different point solutions for your projects and processes. Our solution offers various features like reporting, compliance, document management, and mobile to centralize all your operations.
• Customization: Every project has unique constraints and processes. Quickbase lets you customize your apps using a visual designer to adapt them to your needs.
• Integrations: With Quickbase, you can leverage pre-built integrations with existing systems to unify your data, unlock cross-system intelligence, and promote collaboration.

More importantly, Quickbase offers all the templates you need to streamline project management and enhance delivery. Whether working on a solar, telecommunication, retail, or construction project, you can browse Quickbase Exchange for a suitable template.

Quickbase allows you to build a powerful custom project management app, run multiple complex projects, manage everything, and administer compliance. You can download and edit templates within your app environment to suit your processes and drive results fast.

Simplify Project Management with Tracking Templates

No matter the complexity and size of the project, templates are necessary to ensure frictionless and streamlined processes. They provide a roadmap for your project, allowing you to track progress and activities like tasks, workloads, deadlines, issues, milestones, etc.

With a suitable template, you can gain complete visibility in your project and allocate resources to drive better outcomes. Tracking templates also keep all operations and communication in one central place for easy reference and better collaboration.

For a project management solution that supports different templates, you can use Quickbase to manage and track your complex projects. Quickbase offers a dynamic work platform that you can adapt to suit the needs and requirements of your projects.

This way, you can shift your operations away from manual systems, eliminating disconnects and gray work to improve tracking and oversight. Also, you can fix workflow inefficiencies, fill your data gaps, improve data flow, and power your teams for better productivity.

Get a free trial today and discover how you can use project tracking and reporting templates in Quickbase to drive effective project management.