A complete guide to project monitoring, project evaluation, and project control

If keeping projects on track was easy, there wouldn’t be a whole field of project management dedicated to it. Every project needs to have a system in place to monitor and evaluate its progress and put it back on track when plans start to veer.

Project monitoring is a process within project management that allows you to check in on progress and find a path to make meaningful changes wherever necessary. Project monitoring is another phase of project management, and is just as important as all the other stages.

In this blog post, we’ll look at what makes project monitoring so important, its different substages, best practices, and how platforms like monday.com help project managers with all the heavy lifting.

What is project monitoring?

Project monitoring is one of the key steps of the project management process, which includes initiation, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. In the project monitoring stage, teams track a project’s progress by looking at different metrics that could affect a project’s outcome, such as:

• Verifying a project’s scope
• Timeline for deliverables
• Budgets in relation to schedules
• Quality control
• Team workload

Essentially, at this stage of the project management process, a project manager or other stakeholder is measuring a project’s current performance against the project plan and overall goals. If you’re not hitting milestones (e.g., delivering a prototype within a specified time), the project has a high chance of failure. This stage is essential to identifying additional roadblocks that could affect a project’s outcome.

What is project evaluation?

Project evaluation works alongside project monitoring, and while they have similar goals, their processes are a little different. With project monitoring, managers may look at a project’s progress compared to initial project goals. However, in the project evaluation portion of this stage, they’d take factors like feedback and data collected in the monitoring stage to evaluate why a project is veering off its course, scope, or budget.

In the evaluation part, you’d look at the information gathered from monitoring and making decisions based on it. For example, taking scope creep into consideration, you can consider whether you need to adjust schedules or fast-track certain processes to meet deadlines.

The evaluation process happens throughout the project, not only after project objectives are met. There may also be more in-depth evaluations at big milestones, like the retrospective at the end of a sprint.

What is project control?

Finally, as the last piece of the puzzle, project control is about implementing corrective action to keep a project on track, in scope, and on budget while still maintaining high quality.

In this part of the project monitoring stage, you might want to take action such as:

• Re-allocating resources
• Revising and resetting schedules, milestones, and timelines
• Updating project plans and goals
• Redistributing tasks to team members
• Updating budget expectations

Project control acts as the final substage of monitoring a project, where after you’ve collected data and evaluated how to make changes, you finally put your findings to work by making tangible changes to your project method, strategies, and course of action.

Importance of project monitoring, evaluation, and control

Companies waste an average of 5.2% of their investment on projects due to poor performance. Project monitoring, evaluation, and control act as three sides to the same tool that can be used to help you improve a project’s overall efficiency by catching and resolving issues before it’s too late.

In this stage of project monitoring, broken down into further substages, it’s clear to see how this process can benefit a project overall and better lead to successful outcomes. Project monitoring, evaluation, and control are essential aspects of project management for a few reasons:

• Better ensures project success by verifying a project stays on track and meets its objectives and deliverables
• Identifies issues earlier so project managers can make plans to address and correct them
• Optimizes resources by ensuring they’re continuously used efficiently
• Encourages accountability within teams by solidifying each individual’s tasks and responsibilities
• Enables project managers to identify variances and project deviations quicker before they evolve into bigger issues

Best practices in project monitoring, control, and evaluation

After getting a better idea of what project monitoring entails, it’s important to implement your unique monitoring process with certain best practices in mind. While every team and company’s project monitoring process will look different, if you follow these tips, you’ll be able to get the most out of it and ensure the continued success of your project.

Set expectations early

From the start of your project, you always want to clearly outline project goals as well as expectations on the team and individual levels. Establish what you expect from everyone on your team and make sure each member knows how to clearly communicate their updates or roadblocks so that the monitoring process goes more smoothly

Use project monitoring tools

While you should be using project management tools throughout an entire project, they become particularly helpful during the monitoring process. An all-encompassing project monitoring tool like monday.com will help you streamline workflows like data and feedback collection, allow you to gather reports on performance and metrics, and let you view team workloads to better assess where your project is and what needs to be changed or fixed.

Encourage ongoing communication and feedback

While the process of monitoring, evaluating, and controlling a project may lie with the project manager, it’s a lot easier on the person in charge when there’s effective communication throughout a project’s lifecycle. Getting regular updates from team members and stakeholders on deliverables, roadblocks, feedback, and timelines allows you to monitor progress on an ongoing basis without having to constantly request new information.

Decide monitoring frequency

Some projects may benefit from regular monitoring on an ongoing basis, while others may only need to go through this process once or twice. Consider how frequently you want to go through this entire process, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly. You can also implement monitoring with every sprint or completed project phase instead of having it on a timeline.

Automate data collection

Since project monitoring and evaluation rely on a lot of data that evaluate performance and progress, like KPIs, use automation tools to help collect this information regularly. By having automated reports based on real-time information, you reduce the resources and time needed to manually gather this information. Software like monday.com allows you to automate reporting so that you can spend less time gathering data and more time analyzing and actioning it.

Challenges in project monitoring, evaluation, and control

Monitoring a project is just one of the many things to do on a long list of project management tasks. However, like many other elements of project management, it’s an important step to ensure work is moving along smoothly. That said, monitoring a project can come with its own challenges along the way that can make it more difficult to accurately evaluate roadblocks and provide solutions. Let’s look at some of the most common challenges in project monitoring.

1. Data accuracy: Collecting accurate and up-to-date data is important in complex projects, but can be difficult to do when there’s more than one source of data
2. Scope creep: Projects are prone to changes along the way, making it a challenge to monitor the progress against an original plan when plans are always fluid or if a project’s scope isn’t clearly defined from the start
3. Resource constraints: Having limited resources like personnel, budget, and even time can make project monitoring less effective, leading to inaccurate assessments
4. Reporting: Project managers need to be on top of multiple reports during the monitoring process to gather different types of data, and consolidating all this data can be time-consuming and prone to error, especially when done manually
5. Miscommunication: Using too many work tools can lead to a break in communication and make performance assessments harder to track and less reliable, especially if reporting is on one tool, chats are on another, and you’re tracking tasks on a third

The best way to avoid these roadblocks and others is to prepare your project from the start, including making a plan for how you’ll continuously monitor it by setting clear objectives and trackable metrics. Additionally, using a platform that allows you to do everything in one place, like monday.com, will help you avoid the pitfalls of broken communication, manual reporting, and a lack of accurate data.

How to monitor, control, and evaluate projects with monday.com

Project monitoring and evaluation enable you to make better decisions about ongoing and future projects, but without an all-encompassing platform like monday.com, it can be tricky to keep everything organized. monday.com helps teams and project managers organize data, track performance, follow project progress, and generate reports all in one place.

With easy-to-use automation, communication, and collaboration tools, you can rest assured that your entire team can use one platform for multiple aspects of planning and executing a project. Here’s a closer look at some of monday.com’s features that make it ideal for project monitoring purposes.

Generate advanced reports

Using a custom reporting dashboard, you can automatically generate reports based on the data on your monday.com platform. Choose how you visualize data in your report with charts, timeline and schedule overviews, graphs, and widgets to see all your insights at a glance.

Monitor workloads

With over 27 different work views, you can choose how to best manage your project. The workload view allows you to quickly see which tasks employees are working on, how full their plates are, and what their workloads look like in the future. This allows you to more accurately assess performance, revise schedules, and allocate tasks based on available resources.

Improve workflow management

Implementing change that will positively affect your project is the goal of project monitoring, and monday.com makes that easy. With pre-made templates and boards to get started quickly, you can improve your team’s workflows with personalized automations to keep tasks moving quickly and multiple collaboration tools to make it easy to communicate, send and receive updates, and highlight the status of a task in real time.

Project monitoring at your fingertips

In a perfect world, all your projects would go according to plan. Everything would be completed on time and within budget, but that’s not always the reality. Employees may miss deadlines, external stakeholders may back out, budgets can be exceeded, and project plans may not go smoothly.

Project monitoring and evaluation enables you to identify and mitigate issues that may impact the project scope, quality, timeline, or budget. You can then take those insights and use them to optimize processes for future projects. Using a platform like monday.com ensures that you have all the information you need at your fingertips to best monitor your project, evaluate where you’re at and what can be improved, and take control to steer a project back on course.