Typical Project Management Mistakes — And How to Deal With Them
Making mistakes is an indispensable part of every learning process. It is essential for gaining experience, drawing right conclusions and constantly upgrading the quality of your product or service. However, we should differentiate between “productive” mistakes and those that spoil our business. Below are some common project management mistakes and the possible ways to tackle them.
1. Insufficient resources and/or skills
It is one of the most common project mistakes, which in its turn can lead to the most hard-hitting results. The key point here is to get the right people with right skills in the right proportions involved in the project.
Thus, managers have to scrutinize the skills set of every single team member (including various outsourcers and contractors, who are often overlooked but who often do a huge part of actual work) and make sure they perfectly fit the particular tasks. Moreover, an adequate number of team members should be selected.
The importance of hiring project managers themselves is worth noting individually. Since these specialists are those who will directly affect the team’s activities, the candidates should be picked and prepared meticulously. Always prefer experienced PMs with reliable certifications and strong soft skills. By the way, the latter ones would be very useful for handling the next commonly occurred difficulty.
2. Communication breakdown
Project managers may be overconfident, ignoring reported problems and not paying enough attention to team’s feedbacks. This usually results in delays, budget over-runs, and other unpleasant outcomes. Besides, when people don’t feel they are appreciated, they lose motivation to do a quality job.
Working in a team implies a well-organized multisided communication and team management. PM should be able to approach every participant of the working process, be it engineers, sponsors or other stakeholders.
3. Faulty estimation of budget and time
This mistake is widespread among project managers — both newbies and veterans. This is because it is not easy to make accurate assessments in this sphere. We find this aspect to be mission-critical, that’s why we’ve prepared a separate article on this topic: Time Estimation in Software Development.
The essential skills that help to smoothen this issue are the ability to prioritize tasks, divide big tasks into smaller ones, clearly define who does what and when, and, of course, have an excellent understanding of all the goals of the project. As for the budget planning, a bottom-up approach is a good way to avoid many problems with budget estimation.
4. Paying little attention to project management schedule
It is clear that when people don’t understand exactly which task is due and when, a mess and delays are guaranteed. That’s why it is so important to organize a well-oiled process based on the correct schedule.
It is wise to outline all the activities involved in the project (including scoping, obtaining requirements, coding, testing etc.) and attach due dates for each of these activities. Besides, PMs should not shy away from using specialized software that helps avoid project schedule mistakes. You can read our review of the most effective project management tools here.
5. Considering projects in isolation
Projects do not exist in the vacuum. They are often interconnected with other ongoing product development processes or the ones that were completed before. Being attentive to these dependencies gives space for saving time and assigning the right people for each task.
Also, an attentive PM will find ways to learn another lesson from each working situation he or she faced. Every project’s delivery should be followed by a formal closure event, which is dedicated to looking back on what was done. Documenting and archiving all the info learned allows making right conclusions and avoid needless errors in future.
6. Lack of global thinking
Taking into account a project’s objective is not enough. Each local goal should be in line with a company’s global organizational goals. Each project should add value to the company and serve its overall strategy.
For this, it is very important that upper management has their fingers on the pulse of the ongoing working process and expresses its trust to its participants. C-suite’s support is a pre-requisite for team’s motivation and productive work.
Popular wisdom says that wise men learn by other’s faults, fools by their own. Let us not be fools and master effective project management planning without substantial losses. Learn by whatever you want, but remember you should be ready to face various issues before your IT product sees the world. Learn how to handle them and share this article, so that fewer people are stuck with project management mistakes!
