The 8 Most Common Project Management Mistakes

The following list has itemized some of the most common project management mistakes which people tend to make in driving projects. We were hoping that this list helps to identify some of the common areas where errors and mistakes normally occur. All these mistakes can surely be avoided if each of us pay additional attention to important details. Avoiding these common mistakes inevitably increase the success rate of a project.

1. Lacking of resources with the appropriate skill-sets to assist in the project :
Impact: improperly allocating resources is one of the most critical mistakes made in project management. Getting the right people with the right skill-set in the right place ( job / task ) at the right time is essential and necessary. In time of resource constraint, management will try to pull in anyone to run and drive for any adhoc project as long as he/she has the bandwidth at that time.
– Proposal : Management need to support this by providing the necessary support such as : hiring consultants, out-sourcing vendors, hiring of contractors, proper and rightful resource and sent their potential people for useful and effective trainings. People managers and organizations will need to synchronize the people and the projects as best as they can.

2 : Lack of experienced project manager with the necessary project management skill
Impact: Projects can easily get out of control without having a good project manager watching over the progress of the project closely.
– Proposal : An experienced project manager with accredited Program management certificate will definitely add value in driving for the success of the project. From experience and exposure, an experienced project lead can easily call out some of the potential areas where gaps usually surfaced from. A good project manager excel in people management and communicated well with different level of people across the organization.

3. Lack of Traceability on the frequent changes made to the project
Impact : The budget, resources and timeline will be impacted because of this.
Proposal : No changes can be added into the scope after the cut off date. After the cut off date, any urgent changes / requirements will need to go through the proper process to get all the necessary approvals before they will be reviewed. only urgent request with good justifications backups will be considered. The change request committee will review only the prioritized change requests.

4. Problems Get Ignored
Impact: Problem areas which were ignored or left aside will not disappear over night. Any trivial issue might turn into severe problem if it has not being resolved earliest possible.
Proposal : Problems are inevitable in any project. What can be done best is to carry out as many testing as we possibly can to stimulate and validate before the real deployment is here.

5. No proper planning
Impact: Planning is crucial. The project scope and objectives need to be clearly defined during the planning phase. Without a proper plan( which both party have buy in, such as the project manager and the stake-holders) No project can move ahead as there is no synergy among the team members and there is no firm strategy where the team can tightly hold on to.
Proposal : One way to develop more potential managers is to equip them with the rightful knowledge by registering them into Project management courses and provide them with the essential knowledge. They will leverage from these programs on how effective and powerful ‘planning’ is and how they should be carried out.

6. They fail to see the dependencies between projects.
Impact: 99% of the projects in an organization are interdependent among each other. Project managers need to take this into consideration whenever they ask for any new requirements or changes as these may impact others as well.
Proposal : Project managers need to carry a high level wholly view on what’s happening in the organization, Apart from that, consistent engagement with the stake-holders, key business teams will add value in the organization holistic projects’ planning.

7. Communication Issues.
Impact : Communication is the key to every project. Good communication is essential for any project, no matter it is big or small. Everyone has the responsibility to ensure the messages that they communicated are clear and correct among the project teams.
Proposal : a project manager needs to have great communication skills with the right attitude. However it is almost impossible to avoid communication issues in a project team, especially in a big project with many participants. Thus, building an easy and open atmosphere among the team members and the project lead is important so that the communication are of both ways.

8. Some key dependencies have been over look,
Impact : The key dependencies with their impacts might be :
– Resources engagement : such as testing & development resources will be badly constraint if proper planning has not being taken care of ahead of the projects.
– Testing environment readiness : many a times, people realized that they do not have a testing environment or the testing environment is not ready one or two weeks before the testing commence. This will cause terrible issues to the whole project project milestone.