Tracking Your Project Status Updates

Brandi Johnson

Jul 13 2015 5 min read

As a busy project manager, you need a quick and easy way to track the status of your projects and tasks, drawing your attention to potential problems before they get out of control. Cloud Coach provides multiple ways for project managers to get an overall progress view of their projects, and quickly drill into potentially problematic details.

Project Alerts and Details
On the standard project page, you can see alerts for changes to project tasks. For example, you may see an alert that the projected hours for a task exceed the estimated hours.

From this feed, you can click through to the task and review the project health, and communicate with the task owner about the next steps. Your conversation becomes accessible to the whole project team, rather than being lost in email.

You can also track the status of your project using the Gantt view. A vertical dotted line appears on the Gantt chart to track the current time so you can see at a glance how far through the project you are, and what tasks should be completed.

Closing Tasks
Many projects have task dependencies – where one task needs to be completed before another can begin. With Cloud Coach task dependencies, when you close out one task, the system will automatically send a Chatter message to owners of dependent tasks letting them know that they can begin work.

Tracking Project Documentation
Many projects have related documentation, including client details, project specifications, testing plans, or design comps. Cloud Coach provides a repository to track all of the project documentation directly on the project, including:

Document Name
What part of the project it is related to (such as the particular task)
Who added the document, and when

As the project progresses, your document repository will grow. These documents can be referred back to for future projects, eliminating the risk of losing documents in email or shared file directories.

24-7 Project Status Availability
Because Cloud Coach is built on the Salesforce platform, you get real-time, 24-7 access to your project reports. As the project progresses, live values and projections for both hours and costs are automatically collated at the project level. As a project manager, you can see information like:

The planned and actual hours for the project so far, with the hours over and under projection for where the project will end up based on current progress
Spend so far on labor and other expenses, along with the projected spend to close out the project, based on the completion stage of the project
If you have linked your project to a sales opportunity, you can see your predicted project profitability based on these costs.

Customizable Gantt Views
For the times that you’re managing multiple projects simultaneously, you can also create a cross-project Gantt view. For example, you may want to see all projects with a start date of this month. Using the cross-project Gantt view, you can see the status of the projects, and see additional details by clicking on the project name.

AUTHOR

Brandi Johnson

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