How Consultants and Engineers Can Achieve Real-Time Project Visibility with Task Tracking

In order to manage projects effectively, you need to understand what is happening with a project in real-time and have the ability to make adjustments as needed. This can be a struggle when you use multiple systems for different aspects of your projects. 

Furthermore, it can be challenging to view all of your projects, tasks, and timelines in one place. In this post, we examine what it means to achieve “real-time project visibility” and how engineers and consultants can better manage their projects.

The High Cost of Poor Project Visibility for Consultants and Engineers

When you achieve real-time project visibility, all stakeholders have an understanding of the project’s risks, who is responsible for what tasks within the project, and what your team's capacity is. The project manager can discover any blockers or issues faster and make adjustments as-needed to keep projects moving forward on-time. Your company’s stakeholders and your clients have more confidence in the work that’s being done, as they can monitor the project's progress and understand how the budget is being spent.

For engineers and consultants who are often engaged in long term, complex projects with scopes that often increase, having project visibility ensures that you are delivering quality projects on-time and within budget while simultaneously providing transparency to stakeholders and clients.

What "Project Visibility" Really Means

Achieving project visibility means organizing, managing, and viewing all aspects of your projects so that your entire team has visibility. 

When you have real project visibility you can:

• Accurately assign and manage tasks for your team
• Collaborate with team members and subcontractors
• View and manage notes, documents, and information
• Monitor hours spent, hours remaining, and make any  necessary adjustments
• Link together completed tasks, time spent, and expenses incurred in one place
• Provide stakeholders with oversight and transparency into all projects, tasks, and expenses

At Aldoa, we’ve found that most engineering and consulting firms that we speak to are still using pen and paper, whiteboards, or Excel spreadsheets to manage projects and tasks.

None of these project management methods provide you with full visibility into all of your projects, inform you of outstanding tasks, let you know how many hours have gone into each task, or provide you with the information you need to know when to bill clients for completed work. These methods are also problematic for the dynamic nature of engineering and consulting projects, which often need to be broken down into multiple phases with varying deadlines.

Why Real-Time Visibility is Crucial in Project-Based Work

Having real-time visibility is essential for managing complex projects with tight deadlines. It ensures that the entire team stays informed about progress, potential risks, and timelines. For example, with real-time visibility, you can see that a permit deadline is coming up and the key team member managing the task is out of office. As a project manager, you can quickly re-assign the task to an available team member to ensure that the work is completed and the permit is submitted in time. 

With insights in real-time, you can also understand how many hours tasks take to complete, and if it was more than expected, you can adjust your resources accordingly before running over budget. The longer it takes to see a disparity, the more risk you face.

How Consultants and Engineers Can Increase Real-Time Project Visibility

The best way to increase project visibility is to consolidate your tools into one platform. Many consultants and engineers use Teams to communicate, Excel for budgets, a third party time tracking tool, and possibly a generalized project management tool (or just a whiteboard) for task tracking.

By moving to a single platform like Aldoa that can manage all aspects of your projects, you improve transparency, productivity, and ensure quality projects are completed on-time and within budget.

Task Tracking: Your Real-Time Visibility Power Tool

There are many benefits that come with consolidating your tools into one system. After speaking with many happy Aldoa customers, here are a few of the top ones we hear time and time again:

1. Increase efficiency
2. Boost productivity
3. Improve transparency
4. Organize priorities
5. Delegate responsibilities
6. Collaborate easily
7. Manage project progress
8. Ensure accountability with task and time tracking
9. Solve problems fast
10. Upgrade reporting and analytics

Key Features Professional Firms Should Look for in a Task Tracking Tool

Here are a few of the key features you should consider when looking for a task tracking tool for your business.

First, you need the flexibility to be able to break down your projects into phases. Then, you should be able to create and track tasks linked into each phase. The tasks should be assigned to one or more team members along with a “task watcher” who can be a project manager or stakeholder, so that they can monitor the progression of the tasks and provide helpful input as needed.

Being able to view all of your tasks in a calendar or a Gantt chart will allow you to understand your project more clearly and gain full visibility into your projects, tasks, and deadlines. If the tool that you choose syncs with your main calendar, such as Microsoft Outlook, it will help you centralize all of your information in one place.

Team members also need to be able to collaborate with ease. Having a messaging feature inside of your project management tool will allow for quick communication and will speed up problem resolution. If you can save project documents and notes on each project on the tasks themselves, this will also help to streamline the workflow for your team members. Notifications will help your whole team with due dates. You should be able to set up reminders and include due dates for tasks, that way you’ll never miss time-sensitive deadlines again.

Moving slightly away from tasks, being able to manage hours in the same system as tasks will further consolidate your workflow. Linking the time it took to complete each task in your timesheet will increase transparency and reduce the amount of steps you need to take in managing projects. This will allow you to see if each task took the amount of time you expected to complete it, or if it went over or under the initial scope. This information will improve your understanding for the future so that you can optimize your projects.

Finally, the last feature that you need is automated invoicing. With all your tasks and times in one place, you need to be able to invoice your clients directly. You should be able to see what work has been completed but not billed yet, so you can stay on top of the project’s finances.

How Aldoa Helps You Achieve Real-Time Project Visibility

With Aldoa, you get all the features mentioned above! It is the best project management solution that’s purpose-built for engineers and consultants. By centralizing all aspects of your projects, you improve transparency and visibility for everyone. Consolidating task tracking, time tracking, communication, and invoicing you’ll also improve productivity, efficiency, and employee satisfaction, which will all lead to more projects being completed on time, within budget, and satisfied customers.

Find out Why Aldoa Is the Best Project Management Software for Consultants and Engineers

Schedule your personalized demo of Aldoa to discover how you can increase productivity, profitability, and achieve true project visibility!