How do you set project goals? How do you monitor the progress of goals?

In this world, change is the only constant and technology places a vital role in today’s era of continuous change. Projects are the series of activities that are planned, designed, executed and monitored to bring those changes live. Goals of the project are set well in advance considering requirements of stakeholders, continuous change requirements, resources available and required, business value and acceptance criteria.

Requirements traceability matrix is the matrix which is used in the IT world as a part of software development life cycle. This matrix widely explains the goals of the project which are derived based upon the business requirements. In waterfall methodology, all those business requirements which are elicited from different stakeholders are documented in frame of functional requirement document and software specification requirement document and are finally placed in sequence as per their business value in requirement traceability matrix. It includes all the functional requirements, design component, construction component, and acceptance and test components. And throughout the project, this traceability matrix works as a strong foundation, against which the progress of the project is measured. This matrix is used for preparing record of every completed functionality and test results to identify and review acceptance criteria against the actual accomplishments.

Project manager is the one who keeps track of the project throughout the tenure to keep track of project status, completed functionalities and remaining work to be done to ensure that project is delivered on time and not missing any requirement. Project failure may happen if it is not delivered on time or may increase the budget if not taken care of properly.  With different modelling techniques and Gantt charts, Actual progress vs. expected is measured at regular intervals to become sure of the project success. Planning team, Development team, testing team, design team updates this tracker on daily basis and document the work done based on predefined set of goals.

Since a project includes so many tasks, based on how complex a task is and how important it is, Agile methodology decides the business value and complexity points for each functionality and then the project is started basis that. Alongside developers also take the change requests coming time to time, those change requirements are also taken care of, handle smoothly and are included in the project scope. These goals are broken so specifically that they are specific and measurable at the same time and project scope is taken care of in absolute terms. Team and their strength are considered while preparing the sprints and assigning user stories to complete in that sprint. The team is so motivated that they themselves take charge of those goals and their achievement. Hence best organized team definitely deliver the best results. Team which is focused on main goal and prioritize different goals assigned and spend time in project planning and quality definitely makes the project success. Entire team should spends few minutes in daily meetings, share accomplished work, challenges faced  and support each other to overcome those challenges and drive motivation amongst themselves.