When team members struggle to understand their individual responsibilities and deadlines, it can lead to confusion and delays. And without a clear view of a team’s project progress, it's difficult for managers to identify which tasks are lagging behind or need immediate attention. Project tracking addresses these issues by providing a transparent and real-time overview of all tasks, responsibilities, and due dates, ensuring everyone is aligned and on schedule.
Staying on track, on time, and on budget is one of the trickiest parts of project management. Without a clear sense of all the moving pieces of your project, it’s easy for work to fall through the cracks. If this has happened to you before, you’re not alone—in fact, over one quarter (26%) of deadlines are missed each week.
But you don’t need to do it all on your own. Project tracking tools like Asana give you—and more importantly, your team—a clear sense of the status of a project and an easy way to get real-time updates, so you can spend more time on high-impact work. Here’s how to get started with project tracking so everyone on your team knows exactly who’s doing what by when.
Drive clarity and impact at scale by connecting work and workflows to company-wide goals.
Project tracking is a set of tools and practices to help project managers monitor the progress of their initiatives. Rather than relying on spreadsheets, email, or a mental approach, project tracking tools manage of the ins and outs of project data. With project tracking, you can help team members stay up to date on the status of a project at the individual, project, and program level.
A project tracker is a tool that brings project tracking to life—whether through real-time dashboards, status updates, or progress reports. You no longer need to spend 45 minutes every Friday clicking in and out of different projects just to get a sense of where things stand. Instead, a project tracker helps your team stay informed and organized across individual tasks, team projects, and even complex projects.
Project tracking tools are designed to:
Share task information and updates in real time.
Clarify who’s doing what by when to ensure accountability.
Generate shareable progress reports to keep everyone on the same page.
Simplify status, time, and budget tracking for smoother workflows.
Project trackers and project management software are essential tools for managing projects effectively, offering insights into all moving parts such as overall progress, subtasks, dependencies, and the project scope.
Their built-in reporting functionality tracks key metrics, sets baselines, and makes certain that projects remain on schedule, on budget, and within scope.
Create a project tracker templateWith a clear view of tasks, subtasks, start dates, and due dates, teams can proactively pinpoint bottlenecks and monitor project performance. Teams that use project trackers establish seamless workflows and successful outcomes.
Example: A construction firm improves its project scope management by tracking budget overruns and implementing task streamlining strategies.
Read: What is a bottleneck in project management? 3 ways to identify themProject tracking tools foster teamwork by clarifying key features like who’s doing what by when and keeping everyone aligned on project goals. Teams can adapt quickly to challenges, which makes project trackers ideal for Agile project management and software development.
Example: A development team tackling a complex project redistributed project tasks when delays arose, using real-time tracking to maintain progress.
The best project tracking tools simplify reporting with automated updates, notifications, and clear insights into task status and progress. Comprehensive reports keep stakeholders informed while minimizing manual effort.
Example: A marketing agency utilized automation to monitor project metrics and provide clients with real-time updates, improving their onboarding process and delivering better results.
Silos occur when work and information are scattered across separate systems, making it harder for teams to track project progress and access up-to-date project information. This fragmentation forces teams to switch between tools—like spreadsheets for project tasks, emails for communication, and separate apps for updates—which wastes time and increases the risk of errors.
Project tracking tools integrated with work management software eliminate silos by consolidating tasks, timelines, and updates in one place. Teams can manage project scope, monitor key metrics, and ensure alignment with project goals—all without duplicative work or miscommunication.
Example: Instead of spending hours manually copying data between spreadsheets and emails, a marketing team adopts a connected project tracker to streamline their workflow, reduce delays, and keep the project on track.
Tracking your project’s progress doesn’t have to feel complicated. With the right strategies and a reliable project tracking system, you can stay on top of tasks, timelines, and even your project budget—all while keeping your team and stakeholders in the loop.
Whether you’re looking to streamline individual tasks or manage an entire portfolio, there are simple ways to track progress and keep your project on track. This guide covers practical techniques that help you make the most of your tools while ensuring your team stays focused and aligned.
Create a project tracker templateA project plan is a blueprint of key elements your project needs to succeed. Project planning happens before the project tracking stage—usually, this is the very first thing you do when you’re starting a project.
By creating a plan, you can give team members and stakeholders a sense of your project timeline. That way, everyone starts off on the same page. Then, maintain that clarity throughout the project with project tracking tools.
Read: Create a better project plan in just 7 stepsA communication plan outlines how your team will share information during the project. It clarifies where and when team members can find updates, defines communication channels (like email, messaging apps, or meetings), and sets expectations for frequency and participants.
Read: Why a clear communication plan is more important than you thinkInclude details on when you’ll share project tracking updates, such as status reports, to keep everyone aligned.
Use visual project management tools that make tracking work easier and more intuitive. Here are three types:
Gantt charts A timeline view showing work dependencies, milestones, and the overall schedule.
Kanban boards: Columns like “To do,” “Doing,” and “Done” help track task status visually.
Calendars: Highlight project deliverable deadlines for clear scheduling.
For complex projects, you can also create a project roadmap to give team members a way to easily visualize the overall project schedule. A project roadmap is a high-level project timeline, so stakeholders can get an overview of your project deliverables, key milestones, and overall project goals.
Read: Project roadmaps: What they are and why you need themAt the individual task level, it’s helpful to track additional project details, like how long a task will take to complete. Project tracking tools often offer time tracking integrations to help you accurately track the time spent on projects and tasks with less effort.
Read: Your guide to getting started with resource managementIn project management, a resource is anything that helps you complete a project—including team members, budget, or available tools. A resource management plan can help you clearly define your project resources and their capacity, so everyone understands what assets are available for project work.
Create a project tracker templateAs mentioned above, project tracking is part of a larger set of work management software. When team members refer to project tracking, they’re really talking about three things: tracking work at the individual level, staying up-to-date on project work, or checking work progress across multiple projects.
At the individual task level, project tracking tools can help everyone align on who’s doing what by when. This can give team members clear insight into whether a task is proceeding on schedule and how your project is progressing towards its deliverables.
Tracking work at the individual task level has another value—it prevents duplicative work. When everyone has clarity on who’s doing what by when, you take the guesswork and work about work out of working. This is critical—as it stands, knowledge workers spend 13% of their time on work that’s already been completed.
The most important thing to do while tracking work at the individual level is to ensure there’s only one person directly responsible for each task. Having one individual responsible for each initiative means team members know who to contact about providing updates on task status or answering questions other team members might have.
For example, imagine you and another team member are hosting a virtual event. But because there are two hosts, your guest speakers aren’t sure who to go to with questions. The day before the event, a guest speaker has an emergency, and they contact one team member to cancel. But because of a miscommunication, you didn’t get looped in—and on the day of the event, you’re totally unprepared when that speaker doesn’t show up. With one clearly responsible point of communication, that type of problem can be easily avoided.
You can also track work at the project level to give cross-functional stakeholders a higher-level view of the project work. Instead of being notified about the day-to-day updates, cross-functional stakeholders and other team members need at-a-glance, real-time updates about the most important project data. That way, they can stay up to date during the lifecycle of a project without being bogged down with the details.
There are two main ways to track work at the project level:
Status updates: Project status reports are updates on the progress of your project that help you keep stakeholders informed. Written status updates also replace status meetings and instead offer a way for team members to view the most up-to-date project information on their own time. For best results, share your status reports in the same tool where you manage the execution of work, so stakeholders can drill down into more detail if necessary.
Dashboards: Dashboards are project progress views that stakeholders can access at any time to get details about a project. Dashboards can include things like burndown charts, work in progress, or tasks that are overdue. Like status updates, make sure you’re creating dashboards in the tool where you’re also working so your stakeholders can get more information.
If you’re tracking work across multiple projects, you’ll likely benefit from tracking work at the portfolio level. Project portfolio management (PPM) is the bird’s-eye view that your executive stakeholders or project sponsors want to see. PPM helps stakeholders see the big picture across multiple projects and how those initiatives are tracking against business goals.
At the portfolio level, it’s critical for stakeholders to have clear insight into each project’s status so they can gauge overall portfolio health and performance.
At this level, you can also use workload management to track team bandwidth and capacity. Workload management provides a way for you to see what each team member is working on—across projects—so you can ensure no one is feeling burnt out or overwhelmed.
According to our research, 71% of knowledge workers experienced burnout at least once in 2020. With workload management and project tracking, you can proactively ensure there are no capacity issues coming up by viewing all tasks on the docket in the coming days or weeks. That way, if a team member has a few big tasks coming up, you can reprioritize smaller requests to other team members who might have a higher capacity.
Good project tracking—like all the best workflows—can make it easier for your team to collaborate and communicate. Instead of manually inputting project tracking details into spreadsheets or slide decks, online project tracking tools break down silos to help you track work where you actually work. Share all of your important project information—like details, documents, feedback, and messages—in one place. Project tracking makes it easy for team members, stakeholders, and cross-functional collaborators to see and track work from every angle.
Interested in getting started? Learn how Asana can help your team organize work and stay in sync by tracking all of your project information in one place.
Create a project tracker template