“It’s easy to brief the teams and manage things ourselves!”, some may say, and even ask “ Why hire project managers at all?!” They think recruiting a professional project manager is an unnecessary cost as project managers don’t have much to bring to the table and don’t deliver significant results.
But why would thousands of businesses across the world be hiring professional project managers to get their jobs done, if this opinion was true? The truth is, trying to manage projects without project managers is nothing more than a false economy.
Many projects fail, especially construction projects, as there is no project manager to organize and align the whole process. Lack of planning, attention, and efforts in any project execution is doomed for anything but a failure.
Common Reasons Behind Poor Project Execution and Unsuccessful Delivery.
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Absence of a Professional Project manager
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Poor communication
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No risk management
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Unreliable estimates
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Unclear task division and assignment
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Unclear project objectives
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Shortage/Over-allocation of resources
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Poor controlling and Monitoring
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Even though there are several reasons behind failed projects, one can conclude that most of them can be attributed to the lack of a professional, competent, and skilled project manager.
Firstly, think about how you work right now. If you all sit in the same office, there’s no doubt around collaboration. Since we’re in our third lockdown and are all working from home, the lack of communication needs to be made up for - regular meetings throughout the day via video call and collaboration on online worksheets.
Ask yourself the question about what feels wrong with how you are working now. The answers may surprise you, but they will definitely shape how you approach fixing the collaboration issues in the team.
Failure In Project Management
When a project fails, it’s typically due to conflicts and issues that cause cost overruns and delays in the schedule. The project manager is to blame for not managing the situation to its best.
Inadequate Planning
Poor planning leads to poor execution. Planning goes beyond just creating a construction schedule. Additional items include conducting a risk assessment and management strategy, developing site-specific safety plans, establishing contingency plans, site logistics and lining up the delivery of materials and equipment. Keep in mind that the plan and schedule are living documents that will have to be updated and adjusted as work on the project progresses.
Failure to Communicate
A must for project managers is to have good communication skills when dealing with team members across the construction site and stakeholders. When communication among stakeholders breaks down or is mishandled, it can lead to delays, accidents, costly rework, and unhappy clients. Keeping everyone up to date on changes to the work or schedule goes a long way in preventing major problems from developing that cause projects to fail.
Ignoring Red Flags
When projects are running smoothly, it’s easy to ignore early warning signs that trouble may be brewing. All problems should be prioritized and handled accordingly when they arise. Project managers should be able to analyze and troubleshoot issues as early as possible to avoid delays. Little issues can quickly snowball into major problems if left unchecked, causing projects to fail. Quick thinking and good decision making are what sets great project managers apart from good ones.
Why Project Managers Are Essential To Your Business
The ultimate goal of every business is sufficient growth, creating profit, and building a good reputation on its own. But meeting such a goal is not without its fair share of challenges. Here's a list of 10 strong reasons as to why hiring a qualified project manager is essential to the growth of any business:
1. Eliminate long response times
In today’s extremely competitive market scenario, every business, whether small or large, is trying hard to please their clients by offering prompt responses to their queries. A project manager acts as a proactive link between clients and employees to eliminate long response times by effectively communicating with both sides of the business.
When clients’ concerns are not addressed on time, they are likely to question the dedication of your team. So, your clients must have complete confidence in your working style. The project manager forwards the goals and performance to clients and business leaders to keep them well-informed without any unwanted delays.
2. Strategic Alignment
Every client has strategic goals and the projects we undertake for them helps them to move towards those goals. Project managers bring uncompromising rigor and attention to detail in architecting projects properly so that they are in line with the client’s strategic frameworks.
A project manager will identify a solid business case and methodically calculate ROI to ensure that the project does not veer off its course. Using a highly efficient, all-in-one project management software that makes it simple to manage the projects, schedule work, and communicate with team members and clients instantly.
3. Clear Focus and Objective
A professional project manager is responsible for putting together a proper plan to execute strategic goals. He works to prevent a situation where team members are perplexed about what they’re supposed to do and why.
Tasks are created, divided and subdivided into smaller chunks, and assigned to bring clarity and enable teams to stay focused and direct their efforts towards achieving the ultimate goal of delivering a project successfully. Without a dedicated project manager, a project could swiftly falter and lose its track.
4. Brings Leadership To The Table
What’s a ship without the captain? A competent project manager brings leadership and vision to the table, which is absolutely essential for successful project delivery. Without the project manager, a team is very much like a ship without a captain who navigates it, providing it with a clear sense of direction and purpose.
Project management enables teams to work together, to the best of their ability. Project managers draw a clear line of responsibilities and accountability. They enforce processes and keep everyone on the same page as they are the ones who will ultimately be held responsible for the success or failure of the project.
5. Deal with Potential Risks
No matter how well planned a project is, there’s always a possibility for potential risks in it. A project manager will identify potential risks, analyze the impact they might have, and prepare a plan accordingly to avoid or manage them. Risk management aims to mitigate the undesirable consequences to a project due to the occurrence of the risk.
It’s the ability to foresee potential risks that may arise in the future and develop plans to counter such situations by saving valuable resources (time, money, assets, and people) that make a project manager such an essential part of the project.
6. Ensure a Single Point of Communication and Accountability
A project manager ensures a single point of communication and accountability. Since employees have a lot of tasks in their hands, a project manager is assigned to a project to ensure that deadlines are met. To achieve this, project managers and business leads must stay aligned on the communication.
Business leads typically handle the questions of stakeholders but project managers are responsible for handling project-level details. The latter should be easily accessible to the employees to listen and promptly address their concerns.
7. Project Organization and Management
The lack of organization and management is one of the main causes of a project losing its track and heading towards a potential failure. An experienced project manager will eliminate all fault lines within a project workflow by successfully organizing and managing a project.
Planning, clarification of roles and responsibilities, and well-defined structure go a long way to set up a team for success. Without the organization, the project’s progress comes to a halt and teams realize it very late.
8. Realistic Project Planning
Without project management, over-ambitious budget estimates and project delivery deadlines could be set around. Ultimately, this means missed deadlines and over budget.
Skilled project managers are able to negotiate achievable deadlines and milestones across top management, teams, and stakeholders. A good project manager never compromises the quality of the project’s outcome by placing urgency on the delivery.
9. Quality Control
Teams are usually under tremendous pressure to deliver projects on time. Without a dedicated project manager, tasks are rushed and schedules tightened, and this is when the quality takes a hit. Project managers ensure that the quality delivered is consistently of the highest standards, to keep clients more than satisfied every time.
An experienced project manager has the support of executive management. He ensures adequate time and resources are available to a project, and that the quality is tested at every stage before final delivery of the project.
10. Learning from Success and Failure
Not repeating the same mistakes and improving on past performances holds the key to successful project management. A project manager retrospects and uses post-project reviews to take into account the positives and negatives to figure out how things could be done differently in the future.
As a result, a valuable list of “dos and don’ts” is prepared to help a business go forward without repeating the same mistakes from the past. These retrospectives can be used to remind teams about failures such as missed deadlines, and successes such as the benefits of maintaining timesheets.
Coming to The Conclusion
It is natural for responsibilities to grow, as the company grows. And overlooking every day operations might require a magnifying glass, you know as the project manager. Good project management and competent project managers matter because it delivers success by removing chaotic management, unclear objectives, poor quality, projects going over budget and delivered late.
Project managers encourage and guide their teams to deliver the right results that generate healthy ROI besides keeping clients happy.
