With ClearPoint, you can easily keep track of the progress of your projects to ensure they stay on track and meet their goals. By monitoring key metrics across all your strategic projects, you can create reports that identify areas that need more attention. This gives you a comprehensive view of the status of your projects across the organization, helping you make informed decisions and stay on top of your goals.
Elements
The elements most closely linked to project management are Initiatives, Milestones, Sub-milestones, Action Items, and Risks. See below for a description of each type of element:
Initiative: A project that is put in place to achieve a goal. In ClearPoint, Initiatives can link to Objectives and Measures, and have start and end dates associated with them that can be seen in a Gantt chart view.
Milestone: A major stage or phase in the project, which has start and end dates and is tracked in the Gantt chart view.
Sub-Milestone: A stage or phase of a project that is part of a larger stage or project. Put another way, these allow for the creation of hierarchies and relationships within Milestones. To take advantage of this feature, select a “parent” milestone for the sub-milestone being created. Sub-milestones are indented on the Gantt chart and initiative view.
Action Item: A request or task that usually does not need funding or resources set aside and usually can be accomplished relatively quickly. It can be linked to any element in ClearPoint.
Risk: A potential issue or pitfall in completing initiatives or action items. Like Action Items, it can be linked to any element in ClearPoint.
Summary and Detail Page Fields
The fields below are default fields and can be useful for tracking Initiatives, Milestones, and Sub-Milestones. They can be dragged out onto a detail or summary view, and can give your team insights into how the project is progressing:
Collaborators: This field will show other project team members. While one person will be listed as the owner and bearer of primary responsibility for the project, additional team members can be listed too.
Start Date: This can be used on Initiatives, Milestones, Sub-Milestones, Action Items, and Risks. The target date will be used to track progress, and will be monitored in the Gantt chart.
End Date: This date is associated with the Start Date and marks the target due date of a task or project.
Total Days: This field automatically calculates the targeted length of the project by using the Start and End Date fields.
Today: This field marks today’s date. This will be used to track the Elapsed Days, Calculated Completion, and Variance fields below. Note: This will only show the actual date if the reporting period is set to a present or future reporting period. When looking at past reporting periods the field will use the last day of the reporting period, and calculate the other fields using that date.
Elapsed Days: This field calculates how many days the team is into the project, considering the Start Date and Today fields.
Completed and Completed Date: This field first requires checking the box that the initiative or milestone is complete. After doing that, mark the completed date. This is helpful when running a summary report and filtering by the completed date. Also, in the administrator options, initiatives that are completed by a specific date can be hidden.
Percent Complete: This field is not automatically calculated, as it can be updated by the user over time. This percentage will evaluate progress on the project, and can be adjusted on the Gantt chart view for both Milestones and Initiatives. It can also be adjusted manually in the edit window or on the detail page view.
Calculated Completion: This field calculates how many days the team is into the project in percentage format.
Variance: This field compares the Calculated Completion percentage field and the Percentage Complete field, evaluating the progress of the project versus the target timeline. When a Variance field calculates a 0% variance or higher, this indicates that progress is on or ahead of schedule as measured by the timeline, not by the budget or quality.
Additional Features
These additional features can be useful for project management in ClearPoint by providing further customization and automation to your process:
Mark Elements as Complete: Administrators have the ability to turn on this functionality, which allows users to mark an element as complete from a summary report with one simple click. Learn more here.
Strike through Completed Elements: Administrators can also turn on the ability to cross out completed items when finished. Learn more here.
Custom Fields: Administrators can easily create custom fields to track additional information. For project management, it is common to see a picklist custom field for “Priority” as well as date custom fields. Learn more here.
Reminders: Administrators can set up reminders to let users know that they need to update their data and the progress of the projects or milestones that they are responsible for. Learn more here.
Scheduling: Administrators and Scorecard Administrators can schedule briefing books or HTML exports to generate on a schedule. This eliminates the need to manually run reports that, for example, you need at the same time every month or every quarter. Learn more here.
Project Evaluations: Take your project tracking to the next level. Add data tables, more charts, calculations, and automatic evaluations to further drive insight into your projects. Administrators can turn this feature on for other users to then leverage easily. Learn more here.
Project Dependencies: Align start and end dates of your initiatives and milestones by enabling project dependencies to automatically adjust dates of your initiatives or milestones. Learn more here.