Tracking Workplan Progress
After adding your Workplan to MandE 2.0, it is important to log in periodically to provide updates as tasks and deliverables are completed, upload final deliverables, enter progress notes, and to submit final quarterly and annual reports.
Adding Updates
Throughout the operation, it may be necessary to do things like:
- Update Items: For instance, changing the status of something from “in progress” to “complete” or edit start and finish dates. This is important because the status of these items are directly linked to the dashboards, so that the management team can note whether any Activity is falling behind schedule in accomplishing its associated interventions, tasks, or deliverables.
- Update the Results Framework and Indicators tabs: in the same way, your project’s progress towards indicators and fulfilling the Results Framework objectives are also directly linked to the dashboards, allowing the management team to view progress across all Activities.
- Getting Items Audited: You may have noticed by now a box on certain items that says “audited.” The purpose of these boxes is that it allows management level staff to verify that a task or item marked as complete is actually complete. Only users with certain permission levels in MandE 2.0 are allowed to do this.
- Writing Internal Comments: Within the Activity View, there is a column called “internal comments” with speech bubble icons underneath. This column is OPTIONAL, but allows team members to write memos to each other and their manager that provide additional information about a particular Intervention, Task or Deliverable. For instance, there might be a note saying that an item is overdue because of waiting for confirmation from a project partner.
- Adding progress notes: Progress notes are added to Task Level items. Essentially there is one progress note per quarter, and throughout the quarter, project staff should be diligent in filling it out with any important notes on progress of the specific task. As a convention, progress notes should start with the date you are writing [5/29/2020] for easy recall later, and can be thought of as a diary entry. Progress notes can be read by managers and other members of the team to get a quick overview on what has occurred with a task. It is also a helpful feature that is linked to quarterly report templates, enabling useful progress details on the task/deliverable to be pulled into the quarterly report template. It also helps in avoiding the loss of recall at quarterly reporting
Completing Deliverables
- As your project completes deliverables, it is important to record any relevant information. Do this by going to the Deliverable in question, going to the “Profiles Tab” and filling that out with necessary information.
- In addition, staff should remember to fill out the “Follow-up/Progress” tab within Deliverables if there have been any important updates to the Deliverable since it was completed.
- Moving deliverables: if necessary, deliverables can be moved around. You can move a deliverable to a different task or activity or even move it to the next year’s workplan.
Documenting Deliverables helps USAID track that we are achieving on our deliverables and ultimately get paid. LHSS is a contractual agreement and we are held bound to achieving on our deliverables. Additionally, keeping everything up to date is important since it allows MandE 2.0 to provide a record of what was done and any implementation progress in case a staff member leaves.