Plan and control

Project planning and control
in industrial projects

Plan, execute, measure, adjust – project planning is not a one-off exercise but a closed loop. This page explains the terms, the sequence and the tools industrial companies use to plan their projects and keep them under control across the whole run time.

Linetrack software for project planning and project control in industrial projects

In short

Project planning and control describes the closed loop of planning, executing, measuring and adjusting: structure, dates and capacity are planned up front, and progress is measured against that plan continuously. Linetrack brings both steps onto one data foundation and surfaces deviations before they cost a delivery date – in use at Schnaithmann Maschinenbau and the STOLL Group, among others.

1512

projects managed
in parallel

400+

planning tools
replaced

4000+

completed
industrial projects

10WD

median, to
the first planned project

*Every figure on this page comes from a full survey of all live Linetrack implementations, as of August 2026.

Challenges

Why project plans lose their
meaning once work starts

100% of Linetrack customers named a lack of transparency as their starting problem, 91% named Excel and tool chaos, 59% named manual status chasing. Multiple answers were possible – on average 3.8 problems named at once per customer. Four patterns keep repeating.

The plan starts ageing on day one

The work breakdown structure is built once at kick-off and barely maintained afterwards. Four weeks in it no longer reflects reality – decisions are made on a document nobody keeps up to date.

The actual status arrives by phone call

59% of customers named manual status chasing as a starting problem: the project manager calls around the departments to find out where a task stands. By the time every answer is in, the picture is out of date again.

Plan and actuals sit in separate systems

Planned hours live in the project plan, actual hours in the time tracking system. Without a connection, the planned-versus-actual comparison is rebuilt once a month in a spreadsheet – far too late to steer the running project.

Adjusting without simulation is guesswork

When a task slips by two weeks, it is unclear which successor tasks and which parallel projects are affected. Without scenarios, the meeting estimates instead of calculating – and the effect only shows up in the next status report.

Definition

Planning and control: where they differ

Project control is the ongoing regulation of a project during execution: progress and effort are measured against the plan, deviations are assessed, and dates, capacity or scope are adjusted accordingly. Project planning sets the structure once, up front – project control keeps it valid across the entire run time. Without control, a plan is only a snapshot.

The distinction matters in practice: plan only, and after kick-off you have a document. Control, and you need continuous feedback from execution – progress per task, hours booked, dates moved. In machinery and plant engineering, that feedback loop is what decides whether a promised delivery date holds or is only flagged as at risk four weeks too late. What control actually means during execution — which control variables exist and when to intervene — is covered on the project control page.

Components

What belongs in a project plan?

Project planning is more than a schedule. Six components have to fit together before a promised date becomes a plan anyone can rely on.

Work breakdown structure: splits the project into phases, sub-projects and work packages. It is the frame every date, every hour and every progress report is later attached to.
Tasks and dependencies: describe what happens in which order. Only the dependency logic reveals which delay propagates through to the end date and which one is absorbed by float.
Dates: set start, end and duration per task. They follow from effort and available capacity – not from back-calculating the delivery date everyone would like.
Resources and capacity: assign each task to the department or person carrying it out. Without that assignment, a date is nothing more than a statement of intent.
Milestones and float: mark the points where decisions are made and the reserve that absorbs delays. A plan without float is invalid the first time a supplier is late.
Planned versus actual and forecast: close the loop into control. The plan becomes the yardstick to measure against, and the forecast projects the end date from actual progress.

The first five points are planning, the sixth is already control. This seam is where it is decided whether a plan survives daily operations or ends up filed away after four weeks.

An honest boundary

What Linetrack does not do

Linetrack is not an ERP system and not a time tracking system. It plans and controls projects – it does not invoice them. There is no item master data, no bills of material, no invoicing and no payroll. If you need one of those functions, you need an ERP, not Linetrack.

Actual hours are not captured in Linetrack either. They arrive through an interface from the system where hours are booked anyway: 50% of customers with a live connection import their actual hours for the planned-versus-actual comparison, and every one of them imports staff absences from time tracking or HR.

That is deliberate. A project control system that brings its own time tracking competes with the system HR and the works council already run – and loses. Which systems are connected and how the data flows is documented under integrations.

What Linetrack does deliver is the layer in between: the shared planning and control level where project management, departments and the executive board all look at the same numbers. Fragmented planning becomes complete project and portfolio transparency.

What Linetrack does

Planning and control layer
Planned-versus-actual comparison
Project and portfolio transparency

What Linetrack does not do

ERP system
Time tracking
Payroll

Step 1 – Plan

Planning: structure, dates and capacity in one pass

Planning starts with the work breakdown structure: phases, sub-projects, work packages. Underneath sit the tasks, with duration, dependencies and the department that executes them. Because a task and its resource are the same object in Linetrack, the plan immediately checks whether the planned hours fit into available capacity – across all projects, not just within its own plan.

How dates and capacity come together natively is covered in detail under scheduling and capacity planning. As soon as several projects compete for the same design engineers, electrical planners and fitters, single-project planning effectively becomes multi-project management – even when only one project is being planned at that moment.

Work breakdown structure with phases, sub-projects and work packages in Linetrack project planning

This page describes the method: the terms, the closed loop and how the planning levels interact. If you would rather see the concrete features of the planning module – views, handling, demo – they are on the product page project planning.

Step 2 – Control

Control: measure, assess, adjust

Once the project is running, the plan becomes the yardstick. Employees report progress through task tracking, on the desktop or on mobile out on site; actual hours arrive through an interface from the time tracking system. Together they produce a continuous comparison between what was planned and what actually happened.

Two topics go deeper on this step. The Gantt chart explains how tasks, dependencies and milestones are visualised – and why a Gantt chart with a capacity histogram underneath it is something quite different from a plain bar chart. The planned-versus-actual comparison shows how planned and actual hours are set against each other per task, which metrics come out of it, and at what level of deviation a response is due.

Project management dashboard with Gantt chart and capacity histogram for project control

In Linetrack, adjusting does not mean pushing out the end date and carrying on. The project manager simulates the alternatives – extend a task, add capacity, outsource a work package, reorder the sequence – and sees what each variant means for the other projects in the portfolio before deciding. Only then is the decision made and the plan updated.

The closed loop

Plan, execute, measure, adjust

Project planning and project control are not a sequence but a loop. Every cycle produces the data foundation for the next one – which is why control ends in a new plan, not in a post-mortem calculation.

A weekly cadence works well, and a daily one during assembly and commissioning. What matters is not the frequency but that every cycle builds on the same data instead of a freshly assembled status report.

Plan

Work breakdown structure, tasks, dates and capacity are created on one shared data foundation. The plan is resource-checked from the start.

Execute

Work packages reach the departments as tasks. Feedback comes back through task tracking – on the desktop and on mobile.

Measure

Progress and actual hours are set against the plan. Deviations per task, work package and project are visible without anyone collecting status emails.

Adjust

Alternatives are simulated, decided and applied directly in the plan. The next cycle starts from the corrected baseline.

Case Study

From status report to continuous control

Before Linetrack, the project status was assembled from individual reports and spreadsheet versions, pulled together only in the meeting itself. Today planning, feedback and planned-versus-actual run on one data foundation – the status meeting assesses deviations instead of first having to collect them.

„With Linetrack, we've eliminated countless opaque plans."

Niklas Reitinger

Head of Project Management

Schnaithmann Maschinenbau GmbH

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Still have questions?

Book a meeting with our team.

What is the difference between project planning and project control?

Project planning defines up front how a project should run: structure, tasks, dates, resources and float. Project control keeps that plan valid during execution – it measures progress against the plan, assesses deviations and adjusts dates, capacity or scope. Planning happens once and in advance, control runs continuously during operations. Without control, every plan is outdated within a few weeks.

What belongs in a project plan?

A complete project plan has six components: the work breakdown structure, the tasks with their dependencies, the dates per task, the assignment of resources and capacity, milestones with float, and the planned-versus-actual comparison with a forecast. Without the resource assignment, a date is only a statement of intent – planned hours with no available capacity never produce a reliable delivery date.

What is project controlling?

Project controlling is the measuring part of project control. It sets planned and actual values against each other – hours, dates, progress – and derives metrics and a forecast from them. Project controlling does not decide; it supplies the basis for the decision. In Linetrack it comes out of live task tracking and imported actual hours rather than a monthly spreadsheet review.

How does project monitoring work while a project is running?

Project monitoring runs on two data streams: progress reported by employees through task tracking, and actual hours from time tracking. Both are set against the plan. That shows not only that a task is behind, but also which successor tasks and which parallel projects are affected. Pure single-project tools are missing exactly this cross-project view.

Which software is right for project planning in industry?

Industrial projects need software that plans dates and capacity on one data foundation and takes progress feedback continuously – not a pure scheduling tool. Linetrack is built for precisely that: collaborative project planning plus native capacity planning in one system, tailored to machinery and plant engineering, building and energy technology, construction and infrastructure, and engineering departments. The features of the planning module are on the product page project planning.

What does project planning and control software cost?

Linetrack starts at 10 € per user and month. The licence model is modular: the price depends on the number of users, their roles and the functional modules booked. An employee who only reports back on tasks therefore costs less than a project manager with full planning access. Rollout and implementation are quoted separately, because their scope depends on how many departments are involved.

Do you need an ERP system for project control?

No. Project control and ERP solve different problems: the ERP holds master data, bills of material, procurement and invoicing, while project control plans dates and capacity and measures progress. Linetrack is deliberately neither an ERP nor a time tracking system – it plans and controls, it does not invoice. Actual hours arrive through an interface: 50% of customers with a live connection import them from time tracking. Which systems are connected is documented under integrations.

How long does it take to roll out Linetrack?

The rollout starts in project management: on median, only 10 working days pass between kick-off and the first project a customer plans themselves – regardless of company size. It is then rolled out step by step into further departments while existing projects keep running. 56% of customers additionally had a live connection running within the first six months.

Learn more