Working as a project manager comes with many different challenges. I’ve personally seen each of these while working on my projects throughout the Marine Corps and in my current project manager role.
Successful companies run projects to meet strategic needs. In turn, they expect their project managers to complete those projects on time, within budget, and the scope directed by senior management.
Doing this, though, comes with many different challenges that the project manager and their team need to address to meet time, budget, and scope requirements.
In today’s article, we will work through these challenges and discuss how you can overcome them and ensure value is delivered to your company at the end of each project.
Challenge 1: The Complexity of Scope
In June 2004, a movie came out that started a meme/video clip that has been used time and time again to describe when someone cannot make a decision.
This scene from “The Notebook” became something we all know today – but for project managers, this scene has a whole different meaning.
"What Do You Want?"
Managing project scope is a challenge for even the most senior project managers. Project scope outlines your work and what your project plans to deliver. It encompasses:
Client and/or Stakeholder Requirements
Deliverables
Objectives
The problem is that when it comes to project scope, it tends to try and expand over time, resulting in scope creep. Scope creep happens when you lack the quality requirements to build the deliverables and objectives that meet stakeholder expectations.
This often leaves project managers asking “What Do You Want” to their stakeholders multiple times.
And if not careful with scope creep, your project timeline and budget start going over as well. This results in possibly a successful project but also a project which is late and over budget.
Combating Scope Creep
The best way to stay clear of scope creep for any project is to ensure the project goals and end state are established at the project’s outset.
And you communicate this to the stakeholders early and reiterate it continuously throughout the project. All stakeholders need to agree to the project’s goals, while understanding where we are, where the project is taking us, and how we are getting to the end.
The easiest way to control scope creep comes from implementing a formal change management process. Any requests to modify the scope must go through this process (can be a board/panel) before implementation – ensuring that all changes are fully evaluated before implementation.
Challenge 2: Balancing Stakeholder Expectations
With the above discussion on scope creep and change boards – project managers must balance their stakeholders’ expectations.
A stakeholder is anyone who can impact or is impacted by the project. A stakeholder can be a
Client
Team Member
Senior Management
Donors
Even the General Population
Within each of these types of stakeholders, expectations vary. Just like the saying, “There are many ways to skin a cat,” – There are many ways to please your stakeholders. And a project manager must face the challenge of balancing these expectations.
Achieving the Balance
Communication with stakeholders is the key to achieving this balance successfully.
Establishing communication channels that meet your stakeholder’s needs ensures they have the information they need.
The easiest way to maintain these communication nodes is through the Stakeholder Management Plan. This plan provides you with the stakeholders, their communication method, and their interest/influence on the project.
By writing and following a stakeholder management plan, project managers can set up the communication channels to provide transparent and timely reports to each stakeholder. These reports are tailored to stakeholders’ needs and bring them into the decision-making process.
If you can manage your stakeholders, you can manage the scope and rest of your project.
Challenge 3: Resource Allocation and Management
How many resources do you have that fill that low-density yet highly valuable role that every project seems to need?
Resource allocation tends to impact projects more times than any project manager wants. Having the right resources when you need them during your project plan can be the one thing that throws off your project timeline.
Managing Resources
To ensure a project manager has the right amount of resources, they need to ensure they have a well-oiled resource management plan (please don’t really put oil on it).
In this plan identifies the following:
Resource Requirements
Resource Schedule Requirements
How to Monitor Your Resources Throughout the Project
Learning from my failures, I cannot stress aligning your resources directly towards your tasks within your schedule and/or backlog. This pays dividends when the chaos of a project starts moving and your resources are moving along with it.
Luckily, we have project management software today that helps us track resources against deliverables. Without multiple spreadsheets, the software helps build your schedule based on multiple parameters – ensuring you have the right resources at the right time.
Challenge 4: Time Management
Time is a project manager’s greatest enemy.
Fighting against this enemy requires detailed planning and scheduling. This includes monitoring the project progress against the schedule (earned value management) while watching for delays due to:
Scope Creep
Resource Shortages
Unforeseen Issues
Finding Time
Project managers use schedules to fight against the problems associated with time.
For waterfall projects, the infamous Gantt Chart and for agile projects the more flexible backlog are used for building schedules.
The goals always need to focus on setting realistic deadlines within the schedule. Be open and honest with stakeholders during the project planning – if the schedule looks to have unrealistic deadlines.
Ensure you are reviewing the timelines continuously throughout the project. Progressive elaboration allows you to define the schedule while moving through the project. Still, a baseline needs to be built, allowing the PE to provide the greatest value to the project timeline.
Challenge 5: Risk Management
A project management challenge you’ll never avoid is a risk.
Risks are everywhere and can be:
Internal
External
Technical
Weather
Resources
Market Changes
Regulatory
And many more
Risks can quickly destroy ones project plan, impacting scope, cost, and time if not managed correctly.
Fighting Risks
Project managers and their project teams need a detailed risk management plan. This plan brings a proactive look into risk management through following the Risk Management Steps.
Detailing out:
-
Risk Identification
-
Risk Assessments
-
Risk Responses
-
Risk Tolerance
-
And the Risk Profile
The risk management plan ensures risks are continuously monitored throughout the project.
A great solution to improving your risk management throughout a project is to lean on the role of a project risk manager. Project Risk Managers can easily optimize your risk management throughout a project, ensuring that threats and opportunities are properly cared for.
Another necessity lies in the risk management meeting. This call needs scheduling throughout the project lifecycle, ensuring all new risk are identified, old risk are monitored, and the project continues down the right course. .
Challenge 6: Team Collaboration and Conflict Resolution
Project management relies on project teams – therefore team collaboration is a project management challenge for any organization’s project’s successful outcome.
Depending on your organization structure, this can become a hard concept to accomplish, especially for distributed teams (even more complicated if teams are split across the globe).
Team Collaboration can also be impacted by areas like:
-
Skill levels
-
Backgrounds
-
Location
-
Working Style
-
Learning Style
-
Strengths
Having a team that cannot collaborate on the project = having a team running blind with their tasks. Team Collaboration and Conflict Resolution are critical for team to work together towards a singular goal.
Bringing the Team Together
Project teams need an environment that encourages open communication and collaboration. Putting individual team members in cubicles, blocking them from the rest of their team, impedes collaboration.
Utilizing technology to develop open communication through virtual rooms can even bring in team members from long distances.
And most of all, project managers must understand the Tuckmans Model of Team Development. Knowing this model will help identify the different stages the team members are in as they work towards becoming a highly functioning team.
Lesson 7: Adapting to Technological Changes
In today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) age, this one is highly applicable as AI moves into our organizations.
We are seeing rapid growth in technology – and some companies/senior project managers are set in their ways with older programs. But for organizations to grow and continue to provide value for their customer – they need to embrace this new technology.
Jump on Free Learning
To keep up with new technology trends, you need to learn how to use the new technology for your industry. Whether that is through your company or your own personal efforts.
To do this, all you need to do it:
Take a course
Watch YouTube Videos
Download new programs and learn on your own
There are plenty of options to keep up-to-speed on all the new technology that is out there.
Also, as you learn, experiment with the new technology and find ways to incorporate and hopefully optimize your work. This is the only way you’ll find the right project management software or program that completely changes the way you work.
Challenge 8: Budget Management
Companies love it when we stay within budget. Doing so can be hard, especially if delays or scope creep overcome your project.
There are many factors when it comes to managing a project budget – and one slip up can lead to a world of chaos for project managers.
Balancing the Budget
Project managers need to monitor and control their budget – doing periodic reviews with their team to see where they are going over and where they have extra room.
Develop a budget plan and use earned value management formulas to help yourself identify early issues. The earlier to you find the issue, the easier it is to find a viable solution.
Challenge 9: Maintaining Quality Standards
As project manager, one of our project management challenges is ensuring we provide quality within our projects. We need to ensure that whatever we plan, build, and deliver ends up satisfying our stakeholder’s expectations.
Put Quality Into Your Work
Build a Quality Management Plan and implement the activities throughout the project lifecycle.
Within the plan, ensure you have a Quality Control Process with callouts on:
Identifying quality issues
Standards for addressing quality issues promptly
Quality audit procedures and timelines
Who is responsible for quality throughout the project
The goal of quality checks is to ensure that what you are supposed to deliver is being delivered. The cost of rework might be high, but the cost of not delivering your project to the stakeholder’s expectations is worse!
Challenge 10: Navigating Organizational Dynamics
Not everyone has an organization that focuses on project management, putting the project manager as the top priority for the organization.
Instead, project managers are expected to navigate the organization so stakeholders, action owners, and team members can accomplish their projects. Politics and hierarchies can make finding the right people complicated and frustrating for project managers and their projects progress toward success.
Building Strong Relationships
Start early and start strong by building relationships with key stakeholders. Demonstrate value in your work, proficiency in your trade, and communication skills they can trust.
Being able to navigate the organization, communicate with senior individuals, and the skill in negotiating skills and talent from the organization are key dynamics that project managers can use to overcome challenges.
Also, getting your executives on board with the project is critical. This usually happens through communicating the value it brings to the organization – resulting in higher interest and power for you and your project.
Challenge 11: Cultural and Geographic Differences
In today’s world, most organizations are globalized in some form. Project teams do not always work co-located but are distributed throughout the globe.
This requires project managers and their project team members to work across cultural and geographic differences. Holiday schedules do not always align (I recently saw this problem), words do not always translate appropriately, and time schedules rarely match but for a few hours out of the day.
Working Across Borders
Project managers need to embrace different cultures and recognize differences so that they do not interfere with their projects.
Building schedules, delivery dates, and meeting times to match that of their overseas team members is a must.
Learning to understand each other and taking the time to understand each others cultures goes a long way with teams, especially new ones.
A technique we used was each member of different countries presented a “Country Brief” describing different aspects of their country, culture, and ways of working. This educated and level-set the team on who they were working with – allowing them to minimize the cultural and geographical impacts across the team.
Challenge 12: Regulatory and Compliance Issues
Ugh, I hate this one.
Even in the US, the land of the “Free”, we live in a regulated world that requires compliance to those regulations.
Even for this website, I have to obey specific regulations.
In my current role within the financial sector, this is a huge point and requires months of preparations and board/regulator meetings to pass before going live with products.
Ensuring regulations and compliance across your industry can be time-consuming, driving up costs and setting very specific time frames for your project deliverables.
In cases like my project, these regulatory requirements drive your project’s timeline to ensure you mitigate any impacts before they take place within your industry.
Know Your Regulation and Compliance Requirements
Talk to experts and review lessons learned – understand where, when, and why certain regulatory and compliance requirements come into play for your projects. In turn, develop a Compliance Management Plan to attack these different requirements for your project.
In this plan list things like:
Regulators in your industry
Standards for those regulators
Regulatory requirements of your project
Recent regulatory updates
Recent industry updates to standards and compliance
All of these aspects are critical to your project. You should also ensure someone is monitoring these areas for any changes mid-project execution that could impact your project.
Challenge 13: Managing Project Change
If you ever have a project with no changes, you are by far the luckiest project manager within the project management community.
For the rest of us, we need to manage any changes on our projects. Managing these changes are critical to our time, cost, and scope of our project. Changes are unpredictable, usually coming from aspects like:
Resources
Stakeholders requirements and needs
Technological updates
Regulatory or compliance updates
External market conditions
Weather
And so much more
Wherever and whatever driver the change, we need to understand why there is change, what precisely this change is, and how it impacts the project at large.
Change is Inevitable
To challenge the changes in your project, set up a change board up front and early in your project life cycle. You want (more require) yourself not making the call, but you want your project sponsor, stakeholders, and/or executives to make the final call.
Don’t stress about changes – they are going to happen. Be flexible and adaptable to these changes. Work with your team to find viable solutions, adjust your plan, and keep moving toward your project goal.
Leadership Tip: You can be frustrated. You can show frustration. But at the end of the day, the decision-makers made it. Push your team to complain less and take action more. There will be time to debate the change later, but today, you need to move the planning forward.
Challenge 14: Effective Communication
Project managers need to communicate often. Once you stop communicating, leadership starts thinking you are losing track of your project.
Determining what and how to communicate with all your stakeholders can get complicated. You’ll find that some of the biggest project management challenges come from figuring out which stakeholder wants an email, which wants a team’s message, which wants a memo, and which wants you to knock on their door and tell them in person.
Communication can be complex if not planned.
As Communication is the Key to Marriage, It is the Key to Managing Projects
It is always better to over-communicate and get told to tailor it back than to under-communicate and be told you are not doing your job.
Develop your Communication Management Plan and outline who gets information, how they get it, when and how often they get it, and by what medium they want that information.
Setting up regular meetings, status reports, and different tools available to your organization ensures that everyone has a way to receive information and stay engaged throughout the project.
Be open and transparent in your communication. Do not (Seriously, DO NOT) lie. You want truthful communication that develops collaboration across your team – ensuring everyone is aligned in meeting your project timelines and deliverables.
Challenge 15: Motivating and Leading a Team
Everyone is motivated at the beginning and end of a project. Keeping them motivated during those middle days/months/years are the hardest.
Your team is in the grind throughout the project. Some might live through the changes you are making, and others might put in extra hours to meet expectations for their work.
It is up to you to balance the project needs, team members work ethics, and everyone’s contributions to the projects tasks and overall goal.
Keep the Team Moving
To build the team, you must understand what is keeping them going. You need to find their “Why,” and you need to feed their reward system.
Recognition and rewards for accomplishing milestones, making it through tough times, or huge pieces of work are the standard ways to keep your team moving.
But recognize or find other ways to reward team members who would rather get a day off or maybe a free company gift over a reward. If you have ever read “The 5 Love Languages,” know what I’m saying here (and if you haven’t read it, do give it a read, it’s a great book – they even have one for kids).
Effective leadership in project management means showing empathy and using active listening to inspire your team to continue grinding forward.
Watch your team’s morale and, if needed, find time to give them free time off (with management approval) to unwind and relax. This way, they are charged up and ready to go when they come back.
Whatever you do, lead your team fairly; the rest will fall into place.
Challenging 16: Balancing Multiple Projects
As much as we would all love to have only one project and focus on that singular project, companies usually don’t work that way. Instead, we are expected to balance multiple projects, especially as we are promoted to senior-level project management roles.
Doing this becomes a significant challenge for project managers as they are balancing everything we have already discussed, but now with multiple different teams, stakeholders, deliverables, project management plans, meetings, etc.
This drives our time demands to work on administrative tasks and less time focusing on ensuring you are meeting stakeholder needs – again leading them to think you are not doing your job. Even if you are.
How to Manage Multiple Projects
Well, you first need to buy and read “Managing Multiple Projects” by Elizabeth Harrin. This is the book to read if you want to know how to manage multiple projects and excel at doing so.
(You can check out my review of “Managing Multiple Projects” HERE at The Risk Blog)
Everything starts with balance when working on multiple projects. You need to set your schedule and understand every aspect of all your projects we’ve discussed above. Then you need to set your schedule, plan for stakeholder engagements, find overlap between them all, and drive forward.
The key to managing all your projects is effective time management. You must make time for each project, delegate what you can, and keep yourself aligned with your schedule. In turn, you will enjoy multiple successes vs. just one!
Overcoming Project Manager Challenges
No matter what you do as a project manager, you will face most, if not all, of these project management challenges. So, do not fear, as other project managers have tackled them before – and you will too!
Understand each of these challenges and develop game plans and strategies for when each of them happens.
Write all the sections of your Project Management Plan. You must have noticed all the stakeholders, communicate, change, and other “management plans” mentioned above. These are critical elements you want to build during your project’s initiation and planning phase. As they will help you during these challenging times.
Just remember, Be Proactive Over Reactive – you want to be proactive in your work early as it will reduce your reactiveness each time you cross a new challenge.
The Risk Blog is reader supported – Please consider contributing to the operating costs of running this blog!
