It is the job of a project manager to find a way to balance all the elements of a rather complex project, including time, scope, people, resources and deadlines. Just like every other endeavor, project management comes with its own unexpected obstacles.
The process of managing a projects and all that come with it can be nerve-wracking, and it’s not surprising when the figures indicate that only 2.5% of project endeavors are successfully completed by companies.
Experience teach us that certain contemporary issues in project management are almost certain to occur in the life cycle of every project. To be on a safer side, project managers have to be ready to deal with issues quickly and effectively.
To keep you informed and ready for all challenges faced by project managers, we have put together a list of project management problems and solutions which project managers are likely to encounter while on a project.
Índice
Project Management Issues
A project management team consist of multiple members, albeit with different personality, each having definite roles to perform to bring about success of the project. With a collection of people working together, there is bound to be issues which when left unattended may impair the productivity and objectivity of members. Some contemporary project management issues may include the following:
- Managing your team’s resource and workload: This entails controlling all the work that has been planned or spent by every team member in your project. This can easily be achieved by the use of free cloud-based platforms. Sinnaps online project management tool helps managers properly manage and visualize the workload of team members. It allows you to distribute work knowing if your collaborators are available to work on the planned days or not, as well as have information on your finger tips to see if planned hours fit spent ones.
Manage your teams’ resources and workload
- Team member incompatibility: To promote a positive work environment, project managers can implement team building activities which seeks to realign goals, foster effective working relationship between team members, highlight problems among teams as well as seek ways to resolve them.
- Poor communication between team members: To improve communication across geographically dispersed team members, managers must strive to position communication as a two-way street. This will ensure the buy-in of all members involved. Sinnaps online project management platform is a collaborative tool with features which promote team communication across a projects.
- Team accountability: For every project, there must be someone who sees to it that every team member is up to the task. That person coordinates efforts to see that the project is completed on schedule, within budget and with agreed quality.
- Poorly defined goals: If the goals and expectations of a project isn’t clearly defined, then that project is doomed to fail. Scope is what gives direction to your actions. To resolve this, it is advised that a kickoff meeting is held, where the goals are defined in clear terms.
- Unrealistic deadlines: This is one of the many challenges often faced by project managers. A project manager must set targets or deadlines based on calculated insight, impeccable planning and proper communication of real-time progress to team members and decision makers.
Other project management issues include:
- Scope creep: Most times, a project takes a sudden twist and doesn’t look like the same project you started. This often happens when a project is expanded outside its planned objectives, it thus begins to face challenges in project execution. A proper solution to this would be proper planning and a total understanding of customer needs and requirements.
Free online Project Management course
Lesson 3: How to go from ideal to realistic planning
Issue Management Process Model
Issue management process model that helps project managers to manage issues as they occur. The model helps to record issues as well as identify actions which are needed to resolve them.
Issue management processes come into play when project managers encounter issues that needs to be resolved quickly. These issues include lack of funding, insufficient resources, as well as tight deadlines. Issue management software help project managers to get approval to take action necessary to resolve all business management issues immediately. In general, issue management process models help managers will do the following:
- Identify and record issues clearly
- Document issues properly using issue forms
- Determine the impact of each issue
- Prioritize issues and report on their status
- Review all issues and decide on an appropriate course of action
- Take steps needed to resolve issues quickly
Risk and Issue Log in Project Management
Having talked about issue management examples, let’s look at risk and issue log in project management. Since risks and issues in project management are certain to occur, risk and issue log forms are among the most important tools in the hand of a project manager. Issue manager forms are used by project manages to track any unintended impact that directly affects the project timeline as well as prioritize a suitable response to take care of them, while risk log forms are used to record potential problems or future issues/risk management issues that may occur in a project.
A project issue log example should contain the following:
- Issue number
- Status
- Issue Description
- Category
- Priority
- Assigned to
- Raised by
- Open Date
- Closed date
- Comments
Project Management Solutions
Project managers and businesses are bound to experience certain project management problems from time to time. But in order to determine which project management solution you need for your business, you must first of all ask yourself what business management problems you want to resolve with them.
Sinnaps online project management is a great tool with collaborative features, customizable workflow fields and other features that foster flexibility among teams in a way that enable them carry out their jobs both efficiently and effectively.
Besides, here are various project management functions which can help you to identify more solutions.
Related links…
Importance of Project Management
Network Diagram Project Management
