One question you should consider when monitoring your plan is, "How often should I record progress?" As with most questions of this nature, you need to find a balance. If you spend too much time tracking, you won’t have time to manage the project. And considering that your team members will need to report progress to you, if you track too often, your team won’t have time to work. On the other hand, if you don’t spend enough time tracking, you really won’t know what’s going on in your project, and you might not be prepared to deal with the unexpected surprises that occur in every project.
To strike this balance, you need to combine your personal style with the complexity of your project. If you’re a laissez-faire type of manager who prefers whenever possible to let things happen and you’re working on a complex project, you’ll do better if you modify your style to monitor your project more closely than you otherwise might. Consider tracking at least once each week and possibly more often.
On the flip side of that coin, if you’re a Type-A, "get it done" manager who tends to be fairly "hands-on" and you’re managing a fairly simple project, you might want to consider backing off and letting your staff take over some responsibility. In fact, these kinds of situations provide you with a perfect opportunity to test the management skills of those working for you, and you might consider turning over some of the tracking responsibilities to some of those people.
Another aspect to consider when deciding how often to track and update your project involves the length of the tasks you’re tracking. In general, I encourage you to re-evaluate your plan and look for tasks with long durations such as six months. It’s often difficult to measure progress on a long task, and I suggest that you avoid using tasks with long durations. Suppose that your long task involves designing and building a piece of equipment, and part of the task involves waiting for materials to arrive. If you wait the entire duration of the task before checking to ensure that the materials will arrive when you expect them, you won’t like the surprise when they don’t arrive on time. You might consider breaking a long task into smaller tasks, each of which lasts no longer than one month. That way, as you monitor progress, you’ll find out much more quickly if there’s a delay in receiving materials you need to complete a task. You can name the tasks Design 1, Design 2, Design 3, and so on if you can’t find a good way to distinguish between the parts of the task. If anyone questions what you’re doing, you can explain that you wanted a better way to manage a task with a long duration.
Like the level of detail you plan to track, the frequency with which you track is often dictated by the amount of control you need to maintain over your project’s progress. When deciding how often to track, consider the overall length of the project, the risk of unexpected occurrences between tracking periods, and how close you are to major project milestones. You might opt to monitor some tasks daily, others weekly, and still others every two weeks. I suggest that you assess your project’s overall progress at a minimum of once each month. Remember, monitoring progress helps you promptly identify any unexpected problems and address them, hopefully before they get out of hand.