Project management status

Project management status is the measure of things associated with PM effort. It shows how successful the effort is, referring to completed and pending tasks of project management. There can be a great number of tasks, including tasks associated with project planning, controlling and reporting. It allows reviewing current state of all the tasks in order to measure performance and monitor success of the effort.

If you are going to initiate a new project, you should learn to use project management status updates and keep track of your PM effort. Then you will get control of current PM tasks and investigate what actions can be taken to make management of your project more effective.

 To keep project updates on track you will need to use PM software. Such software should include a set of tools to plan, track and report your activities. In particular, the following tools are essential:

• Project Planning Tool. You start your PM effort with an attempt to plan project activities. Project management software will let you develop templates and checklists that simplify organization and planning of your project. You can use project management status report templates to specify which tasks and jobs of your project are to be checked against the project baseline.

• Performance Measuring Tool. While managing your project, you may need to track its performance and measure success, and reports will be helpful. You will be able to define a set of project success measures in your project management update template and use reports each time when you need to assess performance of your PM activities.
• Project Reporting Tool. Of course, your effort to manage projects will not be thoroughly tracked if no reporting tool is used. Final reports at the end of your project will let you consider whether your PM activities are successful and what lessons can be learned.

A great example is VIP Task Manager.

VIP Task Manager is a program that lets you keep track of your project management status updates. The software features Reporting Tool which acts like a simple dashboard for displaying current status of your PM activities in Excel or HTML view. It also allows building diagrams and charts for displaying your project management status report examples in a graph view.

For archiving the best management of your project activities, VIP Task Manager gives you Workflow Editor that lets design customized workflows. In Workflow Editor you can set task status colors – this means when a task gets some specific status it is marked with some color. For example, tasks with "Complete" status will be marked with gray color, while tasks with the "In Progress" state will get red color.