Top 15 project management mistakes and how to avoid them

Top 15 project management mistakes

Ref: Duncan Haughey/projectsmart.co.uk, Meridith Levinson/networkworld.com

Positions: Project manager, project engineer, project admin, project assistant, project supervisor, project leader…

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1: Projects lack the right resources with the right skills.

Impact: Proper project staffing is critical, yet improperly allocating resources tops the list of most common project management mistakes. Not having the right people on a project can kill it. "The key to getting a project successfully accomplished is getting the right people with the right skills," says Joel Koppelman, CEO of project management software vendor Primavera. "All the planning in the world won't overcome an insufficiency of talent."

Solution: IT and project managers need full visibility into the skills and workloads of all of their resources, including consultants, contractors and outsourcers, who often get left out of skills assessments even though they're doing a "huge" proportion of work, says Koppelman. Project management software can provide such visibility into everyone's skills and workloads.

Once IT and project managers know who's doing what, they have to figure out how to allocate resources across myriad projects and day-to-day work.

"There are all kinds of organizational models," says Richard Scannell, co-founder of IT infrastructure consultancy GlassHouse Technologies. "I've never seen anything that works well. There's no easy answer [to the resource allocation question]."

You just have to try synchronizing people and projects as best you can, says Koppelman, adding that one potential solution is to appoint a resource manager who's responsible for figuring out who will be assigned to each project and for ensuring there's a fair allocation of talent across projects.

Scannell suggests setting up "tiger teams" where people get taken out of their traditional job responsibility for a year or more to work on a specific project. Ken Cheney, director of HP Software's PPM Center, recommends assigning resources at a project level as opposed to a specific task level, which he says is much more arduous.

If you're still hard-pressed to adequately staff projects, you may be able to free up resources by cancelling a "discretionary" project (e.g. one that isn't tightly tied to the business strategy), says Cheney. He suggests looking at your entire portfolio of projects your IT staff is working on to identify ones that aren't mission-critical. "By stopping those projects and reallocating resources to projects that will have the biggest impact, the organization as a whole can be much more successful," he says.

2. Poor Resource Matching

Are you selecting people for your project based on availability or skill set? All too often, people are selected simply because they are available. This could put the project at risk if the skills and experience needed are not present in the team.

It's important to employ the right project manager and team members to deliver on the customer's requirements and expectations.

Build a team based on skill set and experience, not on availability. Consider whether it's worth paying a premium for a small team of highly proficient and experienced people.

3. Poor Project Initiation

Is it worth having a project kick-off meeting? Many projects drift into action without a clear start point. Everyone knows what he or she is doing; it's obvious, right?

Not always.

There's a tendency to forget who has been involved in what conversations before the project starts. I overheard this gem from a project team member speaking at the end of a particularly fraught project: I was never quite sure what I was supposed to be doing.

It's important that everyone on the project team is clear about the project goal, aims and objectives.

All team members need to be clear about their individual roles, responsibilities, key project milestones and deadline dates. They need the opportunity to ask questions if they are unsure about any aspect of their roles on the project or what the project is in the business to deliver.

A project kick-off meeting is hugely valuable in getting the project started on the right foot. It could be the most important time you'll spend on the project.

4. Poor Requirements Gathering

Many projects start with the barest headline list of requirements, only to find later the customers' needs have not been clearly understood. Often, there are gaps in the requirements, dead-ends or requests that simply don't make sense without additional clarification.

One way to avoid this problem is by writing a statement of requirements.

This document is a guide to the requirements of the project. Once you create your statement of requirements, ensure the customer and other stakeholders sign-up to it and understand that this is what you have agreed to deliver.

5. Lack of Clear Objective and Success Measures

The cause of many project failures is not poor planning or lack of appropriate skills. It is quite simply the absence of a clear objective and measures with which to identify success or failure.

Ask yourself what the project is in the business of delivering? This is a difficult question to answer because it needs more thought than you might expect.

When thinking about your project objective, use the acronym DUMB -- doable, understandable, manageable and beneficial -- to help you. Think long and hard about why you are doing what you are doing.

Ask your customer to help you define success measures for the project.

6. Underestimating Time and Budget Needed

How much time and budget do I need for my project? The answer isn't a matter of simple allocation based on assumptions or guesswork.

How much is enough?

Recently, I was in a meeting where the customer plucked figures from the air, looking for confirmation that the project could be completed for what he considered, 'reasonable'. Estimating needs to be much more scientific than that.

Start a project on the right foot by having enough resources right from the get go. Get expert advice from people who have worked on similar projects. Take a bottom-up budgeting approach to arrive at reasonable estimates for the project.

Always avoid numbers plucked out of thin air.

7. Poor Communication with Stakeholders and Project Team

It can be immensely annoying when people on a project fail to communicate properly and then lay the blame at your door for errors caused by their lack of communication. If you don't keep everyone on the project informed of decisions, exceptions, changes, team structures and so on, you can't be surprised when they inadvertently make mistakes.

There is no excuse for failing to communicate with your stakeholders and project team.

Communication is the lifeblood of a project, so keep all communication channels open. Keep everyone updated with the latest project status, risks, issues and developments.

If there is a change of direction, communicate it clearly.

8. Failing to Manage Project Scope

A common cause of project failure and conflict is scope change. In a recent conversation with a project manager running a major Chicago-based project, the subject of scope came up.

I asked whether he was having problems with scope changes. He replied that the scope was not agreed upon six months into the project, so his answer should have been a clear yes. Nobody knew what the project scope contained.

At the beginning of any project, the project manager needs to insist that the project scope is agreed upon and baselined.

The project manager must introduce a process to handle requests for scope changes. The process should follow a set criteria to assess the change for impact on the budget and schedule. The impact of the change on the project must be presented to the Project Board for approval. In some cases, where the change has little impact, the project manager may be empowered to approve it.

9. Doing Everything Yourself (Ignoring the Input of Your Team)

It is never a good idea for project managers to go on a power trip and discourage ideas and suggestions from their teams. Team members are the people most in touch with the challenges, risk and issues likely to impact the project.

Ignoring their suggestions and advice may contribute to difficulties on the project or, in the worst cases, contribute to a failure. Team planning sessions are a great way to engage your team and give them a stake in a project's success.

I'm working with a project manager that shoots down people's ideas and suggestions because she thinks she knows the best way to approach every aspect of the project. People in her team have learned to keep quiet.

As a result, the team doesn't have a stake in the success of the project. They do what they are told, nothing more. It won't necessarily cause the project to fail, but the project manager has put herself at unnecessary risk.

10. Micromanaging the Project Team

Another common cause of conflict on projects is project managers who micro-manage their teams. All team members believe they are in the team for the skills and expertise they bring to the project. They want to feel responsible, valued and empowered.

Micro managing these people destroys trust and can lead to a lack of confidence and motivation.

However hard it feels, letting go of the reins is essential to the well-being of your project team. It can be hard to let go and trust people. However, that trust is almost always repaid. I discussed this very point with my manager recently.

We both agreed, working as a team produces better results. It's also more fun.

11. Expecting Software to Solve Your Problems

Specialist project management software can help with everything from project planning to task and time management, team collaboration and reporting. Today's tools are slick, fast and cost efficient. Much common office software, such as spreadsheets, can be used to help control budgets, assess risk and manage scope.

Project management software is a tool and on its own will not solve problems on your project. Problems are solved by people, not software. Don't buy software believing that it will transform your project and, as I recently read in some marketing blurb, that it "makes managing projects easy". The software is there to help you solve problems, not to solve them for you.

12. Not Following a Process

What's your project approach going to be? Many projects start with a fanfare and a great deal of optimism only to get bogged down and struggle for months and years without delivery. It's not that people aren't working hard. They are, but don't have a clear process to follow.

They don't know how far it is to the finish line.

It's important to know what needs to be done, the order in which it will be done and the key milestones along the way. The best processes are those that are kept simple. They are easy to understand and have clear steps and outcomes.

Everyone knows how far it is to the finish line.

13. Employing a Project Manager Lacking Experience

Managing a project is difficult and becomes even more difficult if the project manager lacks experience. Knowledge of running status meetings, developing a project plan, managing risks and issues, and dealing with stakeholders is crucial to the successful outcome of the project.

Having even a few projects under the belt helps project managers adjust and refine their approach and become fully effective.

You may feel this jars with my recent appeal to organisations to "give junior project managers a chance". Important as an experienced PM is to project success, there is nothing stopping that PM from being shadowed by a junior counterpart.

This way, the new PM learns the ropes while on the job, a valuable personal development step after classroom training. In turn, the experienced PM has the satisfaction of passing on his hard-earned knowledge.

13. They don't take the time to define the scope of a project.

Impact: If a project's scope isn't well-defined by the business and IT up front, the project can end up ballooning like Friends actor Matthew Perry in the sitcom's later seasons. What's more, IT lacks the clarity and direction it needs to complete the project on time and on budget and meet the business's expectations.

Solution: Ill-defined projects are best served by a business case and a scoping exercise, says Intellilink Solutions' Kondo.

14: They don't communicate well with project sponsors and stakeholders.

Impact: IT fails to deliver the expected requirements.

Solution: Project communications need to be catered to the audience, says Kondo. She sees misunderstandings about the scope of a project or a systems' requirements arise when IT departments hand over a spreadsheet to the business with thousands of lines describing the systems' functionality and specs. Because the business owners don't have time to look over such detailed technical documents, they ignore them.

"One side is communicating, but in a language the other side can't understand," says Kondo. "Then IT gets frustrated and they say,'We described this to them. How come this isn't what they want?'" ( Business analysts play a critical role as the liaisons between users and IT.)

15: Not breaking down (big) projects into smaller pieces

“Breaking [a] large project into small, manageable pieces will make the team feel more comfortable and confident that they can successfully tackle what may seem like an impossible project and [accomplish] each task,” says Sid Soil, owner of document imaging and storage provider DOCUdavit.

To avoid leaving your team feeling overwhelmed, “take the time to understand each facet of the project.” Then “break the project into small pieces, and break those small pieces into smaller pieces if you can.” And assign each task to the team members who are best suited to accomplish them.