4 Reasons Why You Need a Project Health Dashboard

One of the most difficult aspects of managing any project is keeping performance healthy throughout the entire project lifecycle. If you don’t, there can be damaging effects on the success of the project, including hindering employee productivity and leaving customers dissatisfied. It’s crucial to track project health to ensure every task associated with a project is having a positive impact on timeline, margin, and customer satisfaction without deviating from the agreed scope.

In this blog, we’ll highlight four reasons why your business needs a project health dashboard. To do that, we’ll look at how Kantata’s project health dashboard is helping professional services organizations proactively monitor performance across their project portfolio, surfacing key insights on revenue, schedules, resourcing, budget, cost, task management, task performance, and project time.

1. Maximize Employee Performance in Real-time

The best way to monitor and adjust the work of your employees in real-time is through task management. A project health dashboard should provide you with detailed analysis of how the tasks you’ve assigned are progressing. By looking at a breakdown of the sum of project tasks, including how many hours were estimated, how many have been scheduled, and how many have already been used, you are better able to see where project delivery is veering off track.

If you see that you’re almost over the allotted hours for a certain task, you can check in with employees to see the status of their work. If they’re struggling to complete a task on time, you can allocate more resources and people to them to ensure customer satisfaction.

2. Increase Profit By Limiting Scope Creep

By using a project health dashboard, you can visualize every resource your company is leveraging on a project, enabling you to understand the work you do for each customer, and to recognize when your customers are asking for too much. Identifying and mitigating scope creep is one of the most important steps to increasing project profitability. By diligently tracking time submitted against planned and actual hours, you are able to see billable and non-billable time for each of your employees and ensure all timesheets are submitted in a timely manner, giving you a more accurate picture of the profitability of your projects.

3. Stop Problems Before They Start By Analyzing Risk Metrics

Use risk metrics to measure potential issues emerging around pace, execution, and resource health. A project health dashboard can help make sure you aren’t falling behind (or projected to fall behind), note when tasks assigned to your projects are or aren’t executed, and track your task assignments and resources to make sure you’re setting realistic benchmarks. Kantata uses the following risk metrics to help professional services organizations protect project health.

Pace Metric

The Pace Metric ensures that your projects are on track. This looks at the number of tasks completed compared to the number of tasks that should be completed by that day. A value greater than and equal to 1 indicates a project that is well-paced. A value under 1 indicates to project managers that the pace of project delivery is not aligned with expectations.

Execution Metric

To complete a project on time, it needs to be executed correctly. The Execution Metric identifies projects at risk due to a number of different task metrics, such as tasks that are past due, tasks with late starts, and logged hours against tasks that have no due date. The higher the Execution Metric value, the more at risk a project is likely to be based on signals that indicate potential oversights in execution.

Resource Health Metric

The Resource Health metric reveals which resources are stretched thin, ensuring burnout doesn’t have a negative impact on your projects. By aggregating data on how many people assigned to a project are working past scheduled due dates, working too many hours on one task, or taking more time for the whole project than estimated, project managers are able to mitigate workforce-related risks before they become issues.

4. Keep All Relevant Project Data In One Secure Place

Organization is the key to project health, and to the health of your entire project portfolio. Too often, important project data is scattered across disparate collaboration tools, work management tools, spreadsheets, and emails, making it impossible for portfolio managers to assess the health of projects across a complex portfolio of projects. Kantata’s Portfolio Scoreboard changes this.

Keep tabs on your project data in one place with the Kantata Professional Services Cloud, designed to support the unique needs of professional services businesses and help them thrive in a changing world. See how Kantata can transform project health at your organization.