Common Project Management Mistakes
Project Management Mistake No. 1: Not Getting Executive Buy-in.
Solution: "Somebody at the higher levels of the organization needs to own the project from start to finish and be personally vested in its success, When [a project] has no clear head, things tend to fall apart."
Project Management Mistake No. 2: Putting Too Many Projects Into Production at Once.
Most managers think that they can get more done by starting all projects at once, but in reality, it's counterproductive. "Multitasking slows people down, hurts quality and, worst of all, the delays caused by multitasking cascade and multiply through the organization as people further down the line wait for others to finish prerequisite tasks."
Solution: "To stop these productivity losses, a good first step is to reduce work in progress (WIP) by 25-50 percent," he says. "This reduces the back and forth and makes managers and experts more responsive in dealing with issues and questions. Though counter-intuitive, reducing the number of open projects by 25-50 percent can double task completion rates."
Project Management Mistake No. 3: Too Many changes to Project Scope.
Project Management Mistake No. 1: Not Getting Executive Buy-in.
Solution: "Somebody at the higher levels of the organization needs to own the project from start to finish and be personally vested in its success, When [a project] has no clear head, things tend to fall apart."
Project Management Mistake No. 2: Putting Too Many Projects Into Production at Once.
Most managers think that they can get more done by starting all projects at once, but in reality, it's counterproductive. "Multitasking slows people down, hurts quality and, worst of all, the delays caused by multitasking cascade and multiply through the organization as people further down the line wait for others to finish prerequisite tasks."
Solution: "To stop these productivity losses, a good first step is to reduce work in progress (WIP) by 25-50 percent," he says. "This reduces the back and forth and makes managers and experts more responsive in dealing with issues and questions. Though counter-intuitive, reducing the number of open projects by 25-50 percent can double task completion rates."
Project Management Mistake No. 3: Too Many changes to Project Scope.
Most managers think that in today's time and space the projects should be agile and adaptable. Yes, if the objectives are to be progressively met and stakeholders have agreed to it. Else even with proper change management we see lot of time, cost and scope getting messed up. The overall satisfaction, moral and intensity of team as well as users is challenged.
Project Management Mistake No. 4: Bottle necks due to resource constraints.
Project Management Mistake No. 4: Bottle necks due to resource constraints.
Companies rarely have sufficient resources to staff all projects concurrently. As such, projects compete against each other for resources, and people are often assigned to several projects at the same time. Those with special expertise of scarce skills may be in high demand, causing bottlenecks.
Project Management Mistake No. 5: Inability to Maintain Focus
Too many of us allow day-to-day demands to overshadow our truly important objectives. Instead, we allow ourselves to be distracted by urgent, although less important matters. Bogged down with emails and derailed by meetings, we are unable to concentrate on strategy.
This problem can be overcome by breaking down larger strategic goals into more manageable parts. These smaller components will be easier to integrate into your daily routine. It is also helpful to keep your product vision front-of-mind by keeping it visually prominent through printouts posted around the office. It is also helpful to weigh the cost versus benefit for each decision before committing to a product change. This analysis can spare you from paying twice for the same real estate.
Project Management Mistake No. 6: Inability of managing key Stakeholders Support
Levels of supportiveness can range from active opposition to active support. For each of the important stakeholders, the project team needs to understand the stakeholder’s current level of support and then determine a realistic optimum level to facilitate the project’s success.
What is a realistic optimum varies, for example, environmental activists can never be realistically expected to support a new road through a wilderness area; in this circumstance the realistic optimum may be passive opposition (as opposed to active opposition) and a communications plan developed to negotiate an outcome that the environmentalists can live with.
On the other hand, your project sponsor should be an active supporter; if the person is merely a passive supporter communication needs to be planned to engage the stakeholder in actively supporting the success of her project.
Achieving either of these objectives needs open communication. If the stakeholder is unwilling to communicate—either because they really don’t like you or they are just too busy—you need to devise ways to open channels. This may involve using other stakeholders in the network around the project to open the communication, using someone else on your team as the messenger, changing the way you communicate or just plain persistence.
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