18 Pitfalls of Project Management and Proven Ways to Avoid Them

7. Failing to Account for Risk

Every project carries a level of risk.  Even a seemingly routine project scope that you’ve performed for other clients many times carries risk and uncertainty.  The project’s scope, resources, finances, schedule and customer expectations all interact; each can adversely impact one another. 

Furthermore, when we talk about risk, we are not just saying that a project may be a little harder or take a little longer.  You must examine risk from a financial standpoint.  Risk is about realizing (financially) the impacts of the variables. 

Here are some examples of risks you might want to consider:

• Internal staffing issues – skills, capacity, experience
• Customer issues – skills, capacity, reputation, experience
• Contractual terms – liquidated damages, guarantees
• Schedule – customer dependencies, penalties for delays
• Supplier issues – sole source options, expediting fees, sustainability

Failing to account for risk can erode a project’s success if not detected and recovered early enough.  While there is no way to avoid risk entirely, there are some things you can do to greatly understand, mitigate and manage them:

• Create a Risk Matrix that registers the risks and potential impact to the project.
• Review a list of risks with the project team often to collect feedback from workers who are in the trenches.
• Periodically monitor the program to evaluate risks that have changed, been eliminated, or are new.
• Proactively work mitigation plans in the background – don’t just leave them to chance (e.g. if you identify a potential problem with a key supplier, invest time in identifying other suppliers well before it’s time to order material).
• Publicize key risks to your client or stakeholders in order to agree on a mitigation plan.  Customers have a vested interest in making the project successful.

RELATED: How to Build a Project Risk Matrix (with free PDF Template)

8. Improper Tools

Execution of every project or program will be infinitely more difficult without the right tools. 

Here are some basic projects made easier with the right tools:

• Planting a garden with a spoon
• Painting a house with a toothbrush
• Changing a flat tire at night without a flashlight

All are certainly possible, but none are likely to end efficiently or with any sort of precision.  Having the right tools isn’t just about making the job easier, it’s also about improving execution speed, reducing cost, and guaranteeing yourself a better end product. 

RELATED: Essential Resources Every Project Manager Needs

In terms of program management, we all understand the value of tools like a schedule, a budget and a weekly team meeting.  Here are some of the often overlooked, yet essential project management tools that you should also have at your disposal:

• Rolling Action Item List (RAIL) – Every meeting, internal or external, should result in actions.  Capture all actions in a simple RAIL that also includes due dates and the responsible individual’s name to drive accountability.  Don’t leave tasks to peoples’ memory (including your own).
• Team Organizational Chart – We have them for our businesses but publishing a project organizational chart can help team members identify who to seek for help on a given topic.  This is particularly useful for a large or widely dispersed project execution team.
• Collaborative Software – Small businesses can’t afford enterprise systems to drive efficiency.  However, if there is one area you should consider investment, collaboration software (e.g. shared file storage, web meeting, instant messenger) can significantly improve a team’s ability to execute, improve efficiency and reduce costs.

9. Lack of Resources

We can all relate to the impact of not having enough resources.  Insufficient resources can mean lacking enough people to complete the job, or that those people are overallocated and cannot devote enough time to the work.  Either way, resource gaps are resource gaps.

Combating resources limitations is a universal challenge in every organization.  In terms of project management, it might result in slow closure of action items, schedule delays or delaying portions of the project entirely, none of which are ideal.

RELATED: How I Convinced My Boss I Needed More People (And Won)

Here are ways to work through inevitable resource limitations affecting your project:

• Establish clear priorities to the project team so people focus on the most critical tasks.
• Track data (e.g. working hours, timeliness of action closure, etc.) to understand and quantify areas where more support may be needed.
• Negotiate with department managers to align on priorities.
• Work with team members’ direct supervisors if time allocation is insufficient.  Communicate due dates to illustrate the need is real.
• Escalate issues and challenges during monthly leadership reviews to gain support.
• Don’t overcommit to customer’s schedule beyond resource capacity; it will only make the problem worse.

10. The Wrong Team

Team chemistry, or lack thereof, can heavily influence the outcome of a project or program.  While great teams can overcome the odds of a difficult project and make it successful, simple projects that no one thought could struggle may become a major problem when personnel are unable to work effectively together. 

Now, to be clear, if the wrong team is assigned to a program, this is not necessarily the project manager’s fault – personnel assignments are often outside the control of the project manager.  Unfortunately, though, the project leader is responsible for monitoring the team to ensure productivity remains high.

If you do have the ability to pick team members for an upcoming program:

• Pick the right people.  Consider the project, the customer, the working conditions and location to ensure you have the right individuals. 
• Balance strengths – Look to have some people who like the details, some charismatic leaders, and some strategic thinkers.  Everyone’s strength will be needed at one point or another.
• Seek motivated employees – motivated workers will persevere in good times and bad.

RELATED: 12 Ingredients of Great Teams

Got a team that’s struggling?

• Confront conflict quickly; don’t let interpersonal issues fester.
• Talk to the individual to understand what’s wrong and what you can do to alleviate the situation.
• Seek to reassign team members if they’re not performing or not interested in the project.

11. Poor Change Management

What happens when your scope begins to drift?  Or, what happens if you assumed one thing, but customer direction deviates from that assumption?  Any scenario that impacts scope or conflicts with assumptions impacts cost. 

Poor change management protocol – essentially the failure to monitor and manage costs over time – can undo any success you have in a project if the costs are unable to be recovered. 

Change, however, is not necessarily a bad thing so long as it’s managed properly.  Customer-driven changes offer opportunities to capture additional funding, to relieve schedule pressures and to renegotiate other terms of the business arrangement.

A successful change management process looks like this:

• Document agreements, task completion and meeting minutes to establish a continuous baseline.
• When changes occur, document the change relative to the baseline, and publish to key stakeholders.
• Evaluate the impact of every change – big or small – in terms of cost, schedule and resources.
• Based on your assessment, quantify impacts to customer stakeholder- in terms of cost, schedule and resources.
• Negotiate additional funding, schedule or other equitable terms.
• Agree to a revised plan to go forward and rebaseline your project. 

A Word of Caution: Changes go both ways!  If you’re changing aspects of the project that impact stakeholders or customers, they may want to recover costs / schedule from you, as well!

12. Committing to an Impossible Schedule

Even with expediting, extra hours and extra funding, some schedules are impossible to meet.  Does that mean you shouldn’t take on a difficult schedule to help an important customer?  No.  But it does mean that you should be very clear that while you commit to give it best effort, it’s not a guarantee.

Working to an extremely compressed project schedule can turn an organization upside down and drain significant funds to meet the deadline.  These are just some of the likely outcomes or consequences you’ll contend with when you are dealing with major schedule compression:

• Significant cost overruns
• Unpredictable expedite fees from suppliers
• Rapid wear on and fatigue of employees
• Increased chance of making mistakes
• Poor quality of work and a subpar product / result

Still, as a project manager, dealing with significant schedule compression is bound to happen. 

Here are some tips to help you manage an impossible schedule:

• Incorporate customer or stakeholder dependencies into the work plan (if they miss their items, it can provide you with schedule relief)
• Quantify tasks in terms of duration, not dates.
• Identify opportunities to short-cut processes that add little value.
• Identify critical path tasks; focus energy on those items.
• Seek additional resources to execute lower priority (or future tasks) in parallel, where possible.