# Introduction

Your project plan can help enormously as you organize and store project information. If that were all you intended to do with it, however, you’d gain only a fraction of the benefit of having a project plan. You reap the full benefit of your plan by using it to track the progress of your project.

By tracking progress, you can:

- Keep your project up to date with actual data.
- Compare baseline data to actual data to help you identify and solve problems as they occur.
- Produce status reports for management and project participants.
- Maintain historical data to help you plan future projects more accurately.

Although it’s easy to track progress with Microsoft Project, it does require diligence. To make your project plan an effective and valuable tracking tool, you must update the plan regularly and consistently. The best way to do this is to update the plan at a set interval — every week, every two weeks, once a month — and stick to it.

You can track progress at varying levels of detail. If you’re interested only in whether you’re meeting scheduled dates, you can choose to track just the start and finish dates of your tasks. If you’re concerned about other aspects of the project, such as costs and use of resources, you can track the project in greater detail.

Effective tracking is a two-step process. You periodically update your schedule to reflect the progress of the project. You then compare your updated schedule to the baseline to determine how closely your progress matches your original plan.

When you compare the current schedule to the baseline plan on a regular basis, you can identify discrepancies between planned and actual progress to date. These discrepancies are called variances. Finding variances early allows you to adjust schedule problems before they become critical.

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