How to avoid 6 Most Common Project Management Mistakes?

Are you a project manager striving to be known for exceptional project management skills? 

If yes, you must learn how to avoid common project management mistakes. To help you out, here, we’ve jotted down the six most common ones among them.

6 Project Management Mistakes to Avoid

1. Not Being Open to Suggestions

You should encourage your team members to share their suggestions and ideas. Not doing this will encourage your team members to keep quiet. This will ultimately harm the success of your project.

On the contrary, by listening to their suggestions and ideas, you can demonstrate good project management skills.

Solution: Hold regular meetings with your entire team and listen to your team members’ ideas and suggestions carefully.

2. Not Having a Clearly Defined Project Scope

Did you know that 37% of projects don’t succeed due to the absence of defined project milestones and objectives? 

Project scope is a complete outline of a project’s all aspects, from its initiation to completion.

The absence of a well-defined scope may also result in inaccurate resource estimation. This, in turn, may lead to poor resource utilization and failures in meeting timelines.

Solution: Hold a kickoff meeting with all team members to define a clear project scope before starting to work on the project.

3. Not Having Access to Real-Time Project KPIs

To make a project successful, it’s extremely important to monitor its progress in real-time. And to track a project’s real-time progress, you need to have real-time updates of its KPIs.

A survey revealed that 55% of organizations don’t have access to real-time centralized project KPIs. As a result, project managers sometimes end up missing challenges or issues surfacing during the course of the project.

For example, due to the absence of real-time updates, they may notice a delay in an important activity only when it triggers a ripple effect on the next ones. Over time, this negligence aggravates present issues further, leading to a complete project failure.

Solution: You can use a resource management tool to monitor project KPIs in real time. This will help you take immediate action if there are variances between planned and real-life utilization of resources.

4. Excessive Dependence on Individual Excellence

Sometimes, project managers remain biased toward specific experienced members they’ve already worked with. As a result, they assign them the majority of the responsibilities.

However, when these high-performers resign suddenly or go on unplanned leave, it disrupts the project flow. It typically leads to burnout and a rapid increase in stress for others.

Solution: Rather than being resource-dependent, follow a process-dependent delivery approach. This means you shouldn’t depend on just a couple of performers for various processes. 

Instead, you should equip the processes with resources of varying levels of hierarchy and expertise.

5. Lack of Timely Risk Analysis and Mitigation

Risk analysis and mitigation refer to the process of identifying a project’s possible risks and coming up with a strategy to mitigate them. A project can have several risk elements such as skill shortages, scope creep, unplanned attrition, etc.

If you, the project manager, cannot mitigate them proactively, they may become major issues obstructing time project completion. Therefore, failure to evaluate potential risks diligently is considered a major mistake committed by project managers.

Solution: Formulate an effective risk assessment and mitigation strategy right at the beginning of your project.

6. Absence of Regular Communication with Team Members

Many project managers proactively communicate with their team members at the beginning of the project. However, once the project goes underway, they allow regular communication to wane.

If you don’t convey the expectations, changes, and decisions to your team members at the right time, it may result in a communication gap. It’ll trigger a lack of visibility and clarity into what must be done, impacting your project’s goals negatively.

Solution: Schedule one-on-ones to interact with all your team members on a consistent basis.

In case you have made one or all of the six project management mistakes we discussed above, don’t panic because it’s always a learning cycle. Going forward, just learn from the mistakes you make and move on.