What Project Challenges Are You Faced With?
We all face challenges with respect to project work. You may not encounter the same challenges on every project, but you will probably run in to at least one issue along the way!
With over 25 years of experience as a Project Manager, I have certainly run in to some doozies! Some examples?
The Project Sponsor was fired the day after our multi-million dollar project was announced.
The client changed the scope half-way through the project and never told me.
The quality team identified for the project had never been involved in any quality-related tasks or processes.
The leadership team identified milestones for the enterprise-wide project yet never told me.
I was hired to fill in for a Project Manager who had left the company, only to discover that there was no Project Charter defining the project objectives and scope. No one on the project team really understood what they were working on.
Funding for the project ran out before the project team delivered the first component of the overall deliverable.
Specialized resources were not available in-house, and the client did not want to hire contractors to fill the gap.
A stakeholder analysis was not thoroughly completed, and a significant number of stakeholders were omitted from the communication and change-management planning efforts.
A client identified risks at the beginning of a 3-year project, but failed to follow up with a discussion on ways to mitigate those risks, and, in fact, never revisited the risk analysis. Period.
Expectations of the leadership team were out of sync with the project deliverables.
Project Management Institute (PMI) research revealed the following as the Top 5 reasons for failed projects which can certainly contribute to our challenges:
1. Changes in priorities
2. Inaccurate requirements gathering
3. Change in project objectives
4. Failure to identify risks
5. Poor communication
In my experience, a Project Charter along with a standardized approach to kicking off a project can go a long way toward preventing many issues faced by Project Leads.. Consistency in process and documentation provides project team members with a better understanding of the project objectives, the way the project will unfold, and the way their contributions can impact the overall success of the project. I believe the project kick-off phase to be so critical that I developed a Project Initiation Kit to help organizations with this aspect of project management. The Kit walks you through setting up a framework to provide a solid foundation for the project.
Not everyone faces the same types of challenges with their projects. I am interested in hearing about other challenges that you may have experienced, and have created a short survey to this end. Gathering this information will enable me to continue to provide tools and solutions to help you, and other Project Leads, in similar situations. The survey is anonymous, and I plan to provide an overview of the submitted challenges, along with some potential solutions, in my next quarterly newsletter, which you can subscribe to below.
Let’s get going and solve those project challenges!
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