It is easy for a company to lose all the progress if they don’t know what direction their project is heading and who is doing what role. To avoid such a catastrophe, organizations adapt project tracking whenever starting a new collaborative work.

With such a strategy, managers or team leaders can keep an eye on everyone’s work without missing anything. Let's go through this article and learn more about how to track a project and its essential components.

Why Traditional Project Tracking Fails Modern Teams?

With modern advancement and new strategies coming out, it is apparent that traditional project tracking methods fail in modern terms. According to the Asana Yearly Global Index, about 26% of companies miss their deadlines each week. Furthermore, as reported by another research, about 72.5% of project managers fail to meet the agreed project schedule, and over 58.7%,do not stay within their budget.

Cognitive Limitations of Traditional Gantt Charts

The traditional Gantt Charts rely on linear tasks, which is a step-by-step manual that a company can use to start a project. However, there have been various claims on its relevancy in recent years, and some organizations have stopped using this technique. To learn why that’s the case, look at the following limitations of this chart:

1. Linear Thinking vs. Non-linear Project Realities: This chart follows a strictly linear pattern, which might not include real-life project shifts and non-linear dependencies. With this, it can create false expectations in the working environment while making it difficult for the team to adapt to such change.

2. Attention Distraction Under Information Overload: A Gantt Chart can overlap complex tasks, dependencies, and timelines of the projects. Moreover, such a cluttered visual chart can create even more confusion, leading to difficulty in prioritizing tasks.

3. Context Loss in Collaboration: Although the chart focuses on task scheduling, it lacks in keeping track of the project content details. When you are working with a huge team, it becomes difficult to communicate about the lost material.

If you want to overcome the complexities and limitations of a Gantt chart, try using a more visual approach. Studies have shown that one’s memory retention increases by “-” with using mind-mapping tools. Xmind is one of those advanced mapping and project tracking tools that boost your creativity, provide seamless project management and more.

Key Elements of Effective Project Tracking and How Xmind Can Help

You might feel that tracking the project’s progress might be challenging, but it doesn’t need to be if you know what you’re doing. This part will provide you with the key components of project tracking, so your team knows where to begin. Moreover, we’ll cover the excellent mind-mapping tool Xmind and how it can assist users with the tracking process:

1. Setting Clear Objectives

Before starting a project, a company should primarily focus on making clear objectives that align with the company's goals. It can guide your team throughout the project on what to prioritize, which direction to go, and what setbacks they can face. In this scenario, you can use Xmind’s project tracking templates and then throw ideas in its brainstorming hub. Furthermore, its AI Copilot feature can generate desired to-do lists catering to your goals.

2. Communication Plan

In project tracking, having a clear line of communication between the members is crucial for a smooth execution. A structured communication plan outlines every aspect of the project to the team without creating misinterpretations and delays. You can collaborate with your teams and stakeholders in real time by using the mind-mapping tool. It offers multiple sharing options, like sharing projects via a link or an email, that can keep everyone's feedback organized.

3. Create a Project Tracker Outline

Another important element of effective teamwork tracking is creating a solid outline, as it ensures that all tasks, deadlines, and dependencies are accounted for. With a clear outline, team leaders can monitor progress without cluttering anything. Teams can utilize the intuitive Xmind to easily move tasks, update priorities, and more without disrupting the entire structure. You can use various markers and tracking timers to keep track of every task on the outline.

4. Project Execution

Project execution is the step where your team needs to branch out every task in the outline into more elaborate steps. Also, ensure that everything is fairly distributed and that the resources and budget limits are accounted for. With Xmind, users can create workflow diagrams that they can track in real time. There are many project tracking templates you can find on this tool that you can spread out with several customization options.

5. Review and Improvements

At the end of the project tracking, managers and stakeholders can schedule a review meeting with the team to point out the mistakes. It avoids delaying the project and lets your team make desired corrections. To do that, use the tool’s commenting and note-taking features to point out the problem to the person in charge of the task. Managers can add checklists for them to fill out when done.

How Xmind Reduced Project Cycles by 34% for a Marketing Campaign

In marketing campaigns, people face several challenges when it comes to project cycles, like inconsistencies, slow execution, and more. To efficiently deal with such issues, people utilize the reliable Xmind project management tool, which has proven to reduce project cycles by 34%. Now, let's look at other pain points in the following faced by marketing firms and learn how Xmind is the ultimate solution.

Pain Point 1. Unclear Project Goals

One of the common issues in a project cycle is having vague and misaligned goals with no clear route for shifting priorities. Therefore, to avoid unnecessary visions on the project, use Xmind project tracking templates and customizable skeleton designs. These include logic charts, mind maps, fishbones, and more to structure everything visually.

Pain Point 2. Inefficient Planning

Traditional project planning is an ineffective approach for a company as it leads them to missed deadlines and unrealistic timelines and budgeting. In this case, you can use the mind-mapping tool to organize every aspect of your project into clear objectives, scope, costs, tasks, and more. Also, make them easy to understand by adding markers and personal stickers.

Pain Point 3. Inconsistent Tracking

Various marketing campaigns rely on manual updates and unreliable tools for tracking the progress of the project, leading to errors. If you don't want this headache, try Xmind’s tracking features, such as checklists, real-time updates, and more.

Pain Point 4. Poor Communication

With a big team with stakeholders, members, and leaders, it is easy to lose the communication line. That is why, to avoid unnecessary delays and misinterpretations, use this tool as a central communication hub. Here, you can perform project tracking with notes, comments, and other options to ensure good execution of the last project cycle.

Pain Point 5. Confusing Roles & Task Distribution

When your team doesn't know what exactly their role is in the project cycle, it can cause responsibility overlap, lost accountability, and task delay. One of the best solutions is using the Xmind tool that offers project tracking templates that you customize and map out everyone's tasks in clear wording and with visual cues.

Project Tracking Template

Now, after going through the various project management features of Xmind, let's learn how to conduct those tools in a real work example with steps. The following is the step-by-step guide that offers downloadable templates catering to your project's needs:

Step 1. Setting Clear Objectives Template

First, head to the Xmind website on your browser and login to your credentials to access its main screen. From here, click the “New Map” option and choose a desired template to begin. When on the editing window, enter your project's topic in the central “Node” and branch them out into actionable tasks using the “Topic” and “Subtopic” icons.

Step 2. Planning and Role Distribution Phase

After that, further expand the main branches of the topic by choosing the “Subtopic” icon in the below menu bar to plan each secondary node. When that's done, open the “Add a Marker to Selected Topics” menu on the right side and access the “Markers” tab. Now, choose suitable “People” icons and add them to different tasks to make it easy for every member to visualize.

Step 3. Monitoring Tasks

To keep everything on track, select the important tasks and add the “Task” icon on them so that others can actively check whenever the task is completed. Afterward, in the same right panel “Marker” tab, add suitable markers, like tag, priority, and task, and star to tasks to show various levels of urgency.

Step 4. Review Final Project

Moving forward, team leaders can go through it and point out mistakes or missing parts by adding “Notes” and “Comments.” Upon adding them to certain tasks, write the feedback when a pop-up screen appears.

Step 5. Share With Stakeholders

Finally, share the finalized version of the mind map by hitting the “Share” button at the top right to access a small dialogue box. Here, press the “Enter Email to Invite” box and enter the desired email addresses. Next, click the “Send Invitations” button and let the stakeholders review them.

Frequently Ask Questions

1. What are the common mistakes in project tracking, and how can you avoid them?

Some of the common mistakes in project tracking include inconsistent updates, unclear aims, and poor communication. Moreover, to avoid all these mistakes, a company needs to adopt a collaborative tool where your team can work as one and continuously refine their projects.

2. How do I choose the right project-tracking tool?

Whenever choosing a project management tool, you need to consider various features, such as AI automation, proper project tracking templates, real-time tracking, and more. With these features, your project team can ensure timely progress with clear goals and communication lines.

3. How can Xmind improve project tracking?

Xmind has proven itself to be the best and the most recommended tool in this article, as it offers more than just simple management tools. Users can explore the brainstorming hub, use AI Copilot to generate ideas, and do real-time collaboration with one another.

Conclusion

In conclusion, an organization's success relies on how they take on a project, like what are their goals, resources, budgeting, planning, and more. If they fail to clear these key components of project management, it can lead to disaster. This article provided you with statistical evidence that traditional project tracking is a poor approach for a company. Therefore, we explored the visual mind-mapping features of Xmind.

With this tool’s advanced mapping and collaborative options, users can create structured goals, assign tasks, and track progress on the same platform. Explore its other features for yourself today and take your company to the top.