Tracking project progress

You’re working on a project in Life QI, and you know what you want to aim for, but how do you track your progress against your goal?

Life QI enables you to set a self-assessment score on the general page of your project. So, every time you visit the project, you and your colleagues will immediately see how it is progressing. This visibility supports you and your team to stay on track, maximise your resources and focus your PDSAs and data collection techniques to continuously advance your work.

This rate of progression is particularly useful when an organisation is looking at a collection of QI projects at a collaborative or organisational level and even shows external viewers where you are on your improvement journey.

The project team, including you, determines the score for each project manually. Life QI doesn't automatically adjust the scale based on project activity. It's crucial to be aware of this manual process and keep your project scores updated.

The Progress Score

Based on a scale developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the progress scores allow you to track your improvement progress over time using a 10 point scale. The aim of the scale is to quickly and simply indicate the level of progress and impact made by the project.

Tracking progress of your work can make all the difference between a successful improvement project, and one that didn’t quite make it. For the latter, the underpinning principle of improvement is learning and continuously growing.

Benefits of tracking your progress:

• Highlight successes
• Encourage collaboration
• Maximise your resources
• Manage your budget
• Track milestones

It’s good practice to form a habit of ensuring that your progress score is up to date. Your score should be a true and accurate reflection of your project at that point in time. For example, have you recently:

• Run a PDSA cycle?
• Collected more data?
• Liaised with your team to plan the next stages of your work?

If yes to any of the above, it’s time to review your project progress score and ensure it’s still accurate!

Tracking progress across a variety of projects

In addition to tracking your project's progress, the progress score provides a quick overview of groups of projects and their respective lifecycle stages. Life QI has a variety of ways that you can view and spread and share project information easily.

Project Lists

Project lists are present on the Life QI Start page, the Projects list page, and an Organisation's profile page. This is a helpful reminder allowing you to monitor your current level of progress on each project at a glance, particularly when you have a collection of projects you are working on. 

Dashboards

Progress score data is often aggregated and displayed on dashboards in the Analytics area of Life QI to enable the monitoring of progress across the entire organisation, or per Division/Department. 

For more information on utilising dashboards – please see this blog link here.

You can see why keeping your score up to date is so important for not just yours and your teams benefits, but also for organisational wide tracking – spread the word!