Everyone makes mistakes – especially when managing a project. Because of the important role project managers play in a business, our mistakes can often feel more impactful. But instead of beating yourself up, mistakes can be a key learning experience. In our over 30 years of project management, we have found some common mistakes people make. We’ve compiled them below, so you can look out for them and avoid them in your own projects:
No Chief Project Officer
A Chief Project Officer (CPO) is key to a project success. Also sometimes called a project lead or executive project director, their role is critical – oversee the entire project. This means all the individual activities, people, and stakeholders. If you do not have one, your project is likely to have elements continue to fall through the cracks, delaying timelines and eating through budgets. While the business world has become more project centric, a large majority of people are lacking this key leadership. As Antonie Nieto-Rodtriguez points out “Despite this massive disruption, most organizations still don’t have one senior leader overseeing or supervising all project activities.”
No Communication Plan
Communication is Queen, plain and simple. With good communication, projects are likely to success – without it, they won’t. It is a skill ALL project managers need to be great at. Projects that have a lot of different stakeholders will require you to use different communication for the different groups of people. Not having a clear communication plan leads to tons of issues down the line, including issues with timelines and budget. Lucky for you, these issues can be easily avoided. All projects start by developing a comprehensive project plan. Add creating a comprehensive communication plan to the kickoff stage, and you’ll save you and your team a world of headaches down the project line.
Lack of Buy-In
A new business process, or technology is only truly effective if your employees/clients USE it. One of the worst things for a business and/or project manager is investing time and money in a project only to have it fail because they failed to get buy-in on the solution before implementing it. But how can you avoid making this mistake? By building time in the beginning of a project to do an assessment and build buy-in from all involved stakeholders. The reason you need to do an assessment is to make sure the new solution (technology, process, etc.) is fixing the problems employees and stakeholders face every day. The reason you need to build buy-in from the beginning is so you can illustrate to all employees/stakeholders HOW this change will help them and add value to their daily lives. Doing this in the beginning ensures you don’t run into major resistance down the line, and/or end up spending time and money on a solution that doesn’t fix the true business problem(s).
Project management, and project managers, are incredibly important and impactful. We play a major role in the success or failure of a business and project. While mistakes are expected, it is important we take preemptive steps to avoiding some of the major ones. The three examples above are a few of many that can be avoided. All of them illustrate one thing: planning ahead and using a holistic view solves most problems you might encounter. The question for you: what changes will you be making to how you perform as a project manager?