Project Management is about getting stuff done as quickly and efficiently as possible, with minimum disruption to the rest of the business.
Anyone can get stuff done if there is an unlimited budget or an endless timeline, but it takes real skill and capability to get stuff done consistently within tight parameters.
That’s project management.
And It can be learned by experience. Executing as many projects as you can with varied levels of size and complexity.
What sets great Project Manages apart from Ordinary ones is their ability to learn from mistakes.
In this article, I travel down memory lane and attempt to list out 10 mistakes I made when I was just starting to tiptoe into this field. I hope these mistakes resonates with yours.
I leave this article open ended for your comments on how one can avoid these mistakes?
Having a Plan in My Head
Back then when I was a rookie Project Manager, I was asked to manage a project which involved streamlining some processes within a department
The Project was so small that working out what needs to happen, when and in which order was straightforward. I could able to do all planning in my head, which led to false assumption that planning a project in my head was generally good idea.
Few months had passed, and I was assigned to large project involving several departments and complex tasks.
I soon realised that when there are multiple tasks and project involves multiple people, planning in head was stressful. It was too much to remember and it was awfully difficult to communicate a plan to various stekeholders
Saying “Maybe” or “I will Try”
Everyone makes this mistake at least once in their project management career. I used to say this quite a lot because I wanted to impress my boss by showing positive attitude.
The boss doesn’t hear “maybe.” He hears “yes.” That may make you a hero in the short term, but it will almost always make you the villain when you fail.
Great project managers hold firm. Instead, they listen to what the stakeholders want in the first kick-off meeting. No promises are made in the meeting. They will work out if what the stakeholders want is possible in the given time frame or budget.
Only once they have done that assessment and planning will they come back to the stakeholders with a definitive “Yes, this can be done” or “No, this can’t be done”
Commit with the Most Optimistic Time Predictions
I lost a count on how many times I must have been answered a question “What’s the Best You Can Do If It All Goes Really Well?”
Inexperienced project managers are often tempted to play along with this question and either make a guess or biased toward their most optimistic planning predictions.
If you promise the best you might achieve, you’ll have a 99 percent probability of failure. Project management is challenging work. So many things have to come together as expected to deliver the whole project successfully, and life rarely works like that.
Stick to your guns. Tell the stakeholder that you need to do the planning, and then stick to what your plan tells you.
Not Involving a Team Enough
When I started out as a rookie Project Manager, I wanted to look like a Hero so I used to do everything alone, without involving any of a team member. Soon I realized that I am not omnipotent. I can’t be everywhere at once.
Even an outstanding project manager won’t get a project finished alone. They need other people to execute the plan, and that execution will always be better if you involve the team right from the start.
Its a good idea to assign individuals to tasks that they have experience in. So why wouldn’t you lean on that experience in the planning stage to ensure that the plan for those tasks is doable?
Having a List of Tasks and Dates
In the early days of my Project Management Career, my premature understanding of a project schedule was having a task list with dates attached.
Task List would work if Project is small and simple, and it’s certainly better than nothing. However Task Lists has major limitations.
A list won’t show what tasks can be done alongside each other. Each task is an entry in the list, but it is almost impossible to tell if that task is big or small, whether it’s a critical task or a floating task, how much float there is for it, or whether it can run late and by how much.
And a list of tasks will certainly not help the project manager to identify the critical path.
Not Planning a Resources for a Project
When You need a Project Resource, God will shower his blessings on you, and Resource will appear just in time when it was most needed!
As a Rookie Project Manager, I used to execute a project in this fantasy world.
People are often the biggest constraint to any projects. However, Resource Availability is the most forgotten aspect of project planning.
There are always managers in various departments cooking up new projects to make their part of the business better, but it’s rare that anyone is looking at the big picture of the total resources available to execute these projects.
Beating Around a Bush in Status Meetings
Have you wondered how a weatherman is able to present a weather forecast in less than 2 minutes?
I wished I had learned this skill and be able to tell a status of my project in less then 2 minutes.
In status meetings, it is very easy for project managers to tell a good story about how the supplier pulled out at the last minute or went bust and how the project team worked into the night to find a solution, and so on.
Stories tell you (selectively) what has happened, but they don’t compare what has been done with what should have been done.
The Project Gantt chart cuts the clutter because you can immediately notice what has happened in the past, what is happening right now, and what should have happened by now but hasn’t. Can you finish your status in less than 2 minutes using Gantt Chart?
Tracking only Project Timeline
As a rookie project manager, I never used to track project costs. The reason was that no one asked questions about cost overruns, and the accounting team was tight-lipped about sharing project financials. This is the most common problem I face even today.
Cost information is pretty useless on its own, as is progress information. To know the real situation regarding any project, you need both. If you don’t pay attention to both cost and progress, then you could be heading for a nasty surprise.
A project that looks under spent is not automatically doing well. It may be that they have spent 90 percent of the planned budget so far but have only done 80 percent of the planned work. In fact, “underspent” halfway through is usually “overspent” at the end, because it’s usually a sign that the project is behind schedule.
Rescheduling Project too Late
As a rookie project manager, I used to be far more optimistic about your project. This led to over-reliance on hope and wishful thinking. I wanted my project to go well and wished everything would go smoothly just as planned.
This wishful thinking is far from reality. Unexpected problems are inevitable in any project. Sometimes the plan starts to slip because of something completely unexpected and unavoidable, like a supplier going bust or new legislation.
The worst thing you can ever do as a project manager is to know that a project is off course and do nothing or say nothing about it until you reach the end, or very nearly the end, when you are forced to finally, suddenly confess.
Bosses and customers don’t like surprises.
Not Documenting Lessons Learned
Finally! The project is over. It was a nightmare—or maybe it was great—but its over. You are anxious to celebrate the success! But wait, have you asked this question to yourselves.
What have you learned from this Project?
Reviewing the project is not really about you or what each project member did or did not do; it’s about building up a knowledge bank for the business to draw on so that every new project gets better and easier for everyone involved.
An organization should never have to reinvent the wheel or repeat mistakes over and over again.
Summary
“To err is human”, and project managers are no different when it comes to making mistakes. However, knowing which leadership and project management mistakes are common might help you prevent a disaster.
In this article I tried listing down 10 common leadership and project management mistakes most often made by leaders and project managers that can put the success of your client’s project at risk.
