How Lucidchart can help you execute a project to completion

With the help of Lucidchart, your project plan is ready to go. You have gathered a world-class team of contributors, identified your objectives, and established clarity about expectations, deadlines, and stakeholders. Now, it is time to execute your vision and turn your plan into reality. 

In addition to being a great tool for planning projects, Lucidchart can help your team stay on task and in constant communication while you execute your project to completion. Read on to learn how! 

1. Use a Gantt chart (or Gantt Chart alternative) to keep track of your project’s schedule

Gantt charts are a great tool for project management, allowing you to map out the time frames of each of your project’s components and visualize any dependencies between them. Using Lucidchart’s Timelines, Tables, and Dynamic Shapes shape libraries, you can create a Gantt chart that includes progress bars so your team can measure its progress in real time. 

If you find that Gantt charts are a bit too difficult to understand and maintain, you can use Lucidchart shapes to create a Gantt Chart alternative for your project.

2. Keep track of tasks with a Kanban board

Kanban boards are another great way to visualize progress on a collaborative project. They are slightly different from Gantt charts because they don’t contain timelines, but you can use them alongside Gantt charts to keep track of all the different components of your project in real time.  

You can easily make a Kanban board in Lucidchart using Smart Containers. For example, you can create three Smart Containers, each representing a different stage of completion (eg. Not Started, In Progress, Done). The items within each container can represent individual tasks in your project, and you can have the contributor in charge of a task move it from one container to another as it makes progress.

You can even use Dynamic Shapes and Formulas to create a progress donut displaying the percentage of tasks at each progress level. 

3. Add conditional formatting to your PERT chart to track project dependencies

If you followed along with our guide to project planning, you may have created a PERT chart to map out your project’s tasks and the corresponding deadlines. Throughout the project execution phase, it is a good idea to return to this PERT chart and make adjustments to your timeline as needed. 

Lucidchart Icon Sets are a handy feature that you can use to mark up your PERT chart when assessing dependencies. For example, you can have each collaborator on your team add an icon to the shapes corresponding with their project tasks to show whether the task is complete or if it is waiting on another task. If there is a hold-up in your project, you can refer to the annotated PERT chart to see what task is causing the delay. 

4. Bring it all together with a project dashboard

A final document that you may want to use while executing your collaborative project to completion is a Project Dashboard. This document is very flexible, as you can customize it with the components that are most relevant to your team. 

Here is an example of a data-driven dashboard you can put together with Lucidchart’s Dynamic Shapes. This dashboard was generated from Google Sheet data that was uploaded to Lucidchart. It can now serve as a progress report that is updated in real time whenever changes are made to the dataset. You can link out from your project dashboard to the other documents related to your project to keep all of your resources easily accessible.

Now that you have a robust toolbox of methods for keeping your team on task throughout their project, you can proceed to manage your team with excellence.

Get started in Lucidchart now!