One of the duties of a project manager is to find out from team members where they are at on their project tasks. This can be done in a lot of different ways including automated or email-based solutions. I have found that these type of solutions generally do not work very well...
Uh-oh. This is a show-stopper. We can't complete the project on time because the part that we need won't be available for another 3 months! What will we do?
“A plan never survives contact with the enemy.” If you are using Microsoft Project and things do not go as planned, your project has “issues”. :) You can track these issues as tasks in the project schedule. How do you do this in MS Project?
A work breakdown structure (WBS) is often done incorrectly and even the PMBOK has a bad example of it. This is how to make it useful and do it correctly.