Keep your jobs on track with project tracking and job management software

Integrated within wider agency management software, see it all in one place. 

 

Synergist is designed to support the management of multiple projects in busy agency or consultancy environments. Synergist's project tracking functionality makes job management easier, assessing project health in simple visual dashboards and flagging potential issues early in key reports to avoid expensive surprises. 

The project tracking tools make job management simpler by allowing individuals, teams, and agency leaders to track project progress in real time with ease. Everything is always easy-to-follow, in a simple colour-coded interface, and all the information you need in one place.

Put simply, Synergist's job management software tells each role what they need to know. Overall, everyone in the agency gains visibility of:

  • how you’re progressing against budget and deadlines
  • who has, is and will be working on a job
  • which jobs are due to hit which department tomorrow
  • which jobs are on hold waiting for client feedback
  • how profitable the job is likely to be

If you want to learn more about how Synergist helps each individual role, you might enjoy this article, Synergist for every member of the team, which delves into this in more detail.

Tracking Job Progression from Start to Finish

Is the project on schedule? Is it likely to finish on time? Will it be on budget? Welcome to the three most commonly-asked questions in project-based businesses like agencies.

Project managers, client services, management and clients: everybody wants to know how the job is progressing. It can be a complex task to track it all, because continuous changes take place. Unexpected snags, delays caused by the client, sudden unavailability of key personnel, surprise technical hurdles – it’s no wonder that job progression is on everybody’s mind.

One element of Synergist is a project tracker. It helps you track time, projects and jobs, and their related costs, expenses, client approvals, job specifications, project checklists, and so on. However, as complete agency management software, Synergist negates the need for having separate apps and avoids the creation of separate silos of information – the bane of so many agencies.

The following are some details of what Synergist delivers, to give you a flavour of it.


Estimated costs vs actual costs

Key to effective project management, Synergist offers three ways of viewing this with supporting tools to proactively inform you of certain situations arising:

  • The estimate and financial tab at either job or phase level gives a live snapshot of progress vs budget, along with actual and forecast profitability. Colour changing thermometers give a quick visual indication of areas needing further investigation. You can then drill down into any element to get at the details in order to take whatever actions are needed.
  • You can run a cost report straight from the job itself. This can be output as a pdf, and it’s even possible to create custom versions of this report to meet any bespoke needs.
  • ‘Costs & Quotes’ is the name of one of Synergist’s suite of standard reports. Allowing you to view a selection of projects, it gives you one line per project or, if you choose to break the project down into chunks, also by phases and stages.

The report shows the job (or phase) values based on the dates and date ranges you choose to see. Estimated and actual costs are shown, with the difference between them expressed as a value and a percentage. Similarly, quoted prices and actual recommended charges are compared in the same way.


A user tip

Many Synergist users use these project management tools to take a snapshot at say 50% use of budget, the point being that it is a useful milestone from which to check if 50% of the project is complete. It’s a great habit to adopt and Synergist can even alert you by email when a certain % of budget has been used.


Job & Project Progression: Waterfall

Jobs / projects can be broken down into stages via the Schedule tab.

A schedule can be created at either the job level or on every phase of a job. A schedule is a list of stages, each of which has a start and end date and can be allocated to a person who is responsible for completing the work. The list of stages can be viewed as a Gantt chart.

Note that the Gantt chart is interactive and that it can be updated either via the underlying data or by grabbing the start or end dates of the Gantt chart itself and moving them. Dependencies between stages can be added via a simple drag-and-drop interface ensuring future updates are even quicker and relationships maintained.


Agile / Kanban

Many projects or jobs are better suited to an Agile project management tool. Synergist accommodates this via Kanban boards. These gives each member of the team a visual summary of the workload and progress by task, and the ability to update a tasks status by dragging and dropping it into the appropriate columns that you define.


With all these tools, it is easy to track the progression of every job / project at any moment, safe in the knowledge that a one-glance view always captures every team member’s latest updates.

You can find out more on our Kanban boards page.


If you'd like to know more about how all the different elements involved in project tracking are integrated within Synergist to provide instant, live reporting, reduce admin and aid collaboration, click below.

View Flow Of Work In Synergist

Or if you're ready to know more, you can book a one-to-one online demo. Your demo will be tailored to your questions and requirements.