Project Action Tracker

Like most things, you can engineer this to do anything, if you are an ace at automation, you can easily use the Action Tracker to update Project Schedules or vice-versa. Whilst the Action Trackers potential is perhaps limitless, you should try to avoid over-engineering it. Remember the 1960’s US Naval principle; KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and don’t go crazy.

All you really need to capture is:

• A reference (optional, but has benefits if you do want to link to other documents)
• The Action
• The Owner
• Due Date
• Delivered Date
• Priority (optional, but helps with reporting status)
• Updates
• Status (open, closed, hold, due, or something similar)

For those of us that work on Programmes, multiple Projects or Projects with large and complex information flows, then you may also want to record a way of identifying the Project, Customer, Project Stream, etc.

Why do we use Action Trackers?

We mainly use Action Trackers to keep an eye on activities that people promise us or to track things that we’ve promised to others. We may use different formats which have more or less information for Internal customers compared to External customers. For example, the internal Action Tracker might detail tasks to be completed by individuals, whereas an External Action Tracker might details deliverables by Business Unit or by Business Partners.

I’ve just used the term ‘deliverable’, but deliverables can vary in size. Major deliverables will be recorded in your Project Schedule, but there are many minor deliverables that are equally important but are far too detailed for a Project Schedule.

In my current role; I keep a couple of templates available to me based on the usual types of projects I need to track. Those templates act as simple templates for ensuring my project start-up activities are covered off before growing to track the actual Actions that will be identified as the project matures. Can I remember all of these Actions without an Action Tracker?

Probably, but I work in a team and whilst I take ownership for a number of projects and prospects, there are other people that can pick things up when I go on vacation or if I’m ill, perhaps I have a few projects that ramp up at the same time, keeping Action Trackers up to date helps me stay on top of things and helps my team pick up the slack if I am unavailable for any reason.

What can you use to track your actions?

I chose the section headers so I can only blame myself for such an open ended question…

For companies with SharePoint, there you go, that’s a great shared working space that you can use for a number of project documents. In fact I would suggest that if you do have SharePoint, then you create a ‘Site’ for each project and build out these documents in project specific Sites. SharePoint makes it easy to backup, audit, roll-back, track changes, build work-flows and issue notifications when a page or section is updated.

Microsoft Access is another awesome tool and one that allows you to use those unique references to link multiple project documents together. For example, identifying a Risk in your Action Tracker can be linked to your Risk Register using something like Access.

Oracle Apex; this is a fantastic system. If you have Oracle in your workspace, then using Apex to build web-front ends for your Oracle data allows you to build an interface that suits your project requirements and ensures tracking and data security.

Microsoft Excel; this is probably the simplest and easiest tool. You can ‘engineer’ the spreadsheet to meet every requirement your project has with ease and a very smooth learning curve. This is my go-to tool for most list based documents. I can still use references to link into other documents which aid automation and I can use something like SharePoint to publish, share and track changes as needed.

There are custom apps, CRM’s, ERPs and Service Management tools that can all be used to produce an Action Tracker. Furthermore, any use of Microsoft Excel can usually be replicated in Google Docs/Google Drive without issue.

How to build your own action Tracker

For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to use Microsoft Excel, we can build upon this late, but essentially we want the final product to look like this:

If you make something awesome, then feel free to share it and if you have any suggestions on other Action Tracking tools or the level of information you think should be captured then please let me know.