4 Project Management Problems And How You Can Address Them
Being a project manager is tough. It means a lot of work. Your day to day is comprised of a lot of meetings, facing and solving a host of problems, asking for resources when the ones you have are insufficient (which, you’ll find, is most of the time), following up on a million tiny details, writing up constant reports on how your project is evolving, not to mention dealing with a lot of different people, many of which don’t really make the job any easier on you.
You have to be a good leader, a great communicator and negotiator, an excellent problem-solver (which requires a lot of out-of-the-box thinking on your part), you have to be creative, not to mention able to both micromanage and see the big picture, both to take matters into your own hands and delegate. You need to be confident and able to make decisions without asking for help or guidance all the time.
All in all, it’s tough and stressful work. Still, it’s a great job when you get to present results, it’s challenging and not prone to force a certain routine on you. Working as a project manager means you’ll most certainly face a lot of problems, most of which you’ll have to solve on your own. Still, there are a few common problems that we can help you solve. Most project managers face these issues in their day-to-day, and they’ve found approaches to them that usually solve the issue without too much hassle on their part, keeping them free to work on the more complicated aspects of their job.
Here are a few of these issues and the proposed solutions.
1. Your Client is Vague and/or Fickle
Sometimes your client will keep giving you vague directions and he’ll change his mind a thousand times. Indecisive clients are very hard to deal with, because they mess up your workflow. That’s a fact.
This problem does have an easy fix, though. If your client is unsure of some of his requirements, odds are that he needs to see some of the work done before he can make up his mind about other aspects. You should set clear milestones of these points, tell him that after each milestone you will need specific directions on the next part of the process. That will help them get their thoughts organized and keep them focused.
More so, be specific at the beginning of every project about how many times the client can change their mind about certain aspects of the project before it’s too much of a hassle and you’ll have to raise your rates. It’s important to attach a number to it, such as 10 minor changes and 2 major ones before your rate goes up by 25%.
2. Your Management Template Just Isn’t Working
You’ve developed a “method” for dealing with project management. You now have the template and all you have to do is apply it on any project that comes your way. But, somehow, it isn’t working. For some reason, the milestones that worked on your previous project aren’t working on this one.
This problem is even simpler than the other one. You shouldn’t have any template. That’s just cutting corners. Every project is unique and has a unique set of circumstances, people and resources. Sure, two projects may be similar, but that’s no excuse to try and shoehorn one project into the template you built while working on another. Take the time to sit down and design each project’s milestones individually. You’ll find that it’s for the best if you do.
3. Your Client Takes Forever To Answer
In order to make progress on a project, you need feedback. Your client is a busy man, though. That’s one of the reasons he hired you to manage his project and didn’t take it into his own hands. This means that, sometimes, you’ll wind up with a client who takes days to answer email.
Nothing is more frustrating than waiting around for a reply in order to carry on with what you’re doing, so here’s some advice: don’t. Your client is probably late to reply because you keep asking him open-ended questions and thus forcing him to think of solutions and comprehensive answers to your questions.
What you should be doing is choosing a path, based on your experience and your previous conversations with the client as well as the nature of the project you’re working on and just ask the client if it’s OK to continue this course of action. Like we said in the intro of this article: you need to be able to make decisions on your own. Nobody likes being forced to micromanage when they’ve already delegated the task.
More so, this forces the client to be speedy with their reply since, if the choice you’ve made is to their liking, they just have to give you the go-ahead and, if not, then they have to tell you to stop because if you continue with this course of action, the project will be moving in a bad direction.
4. You’re Spending Too Much Time Adjusting Your Project After Completion
It’s normal to have some kinks to work out of the project even after it goes live. That’s not a big deal. But, if you do find yourself spending way too much time fixing stuff about a project that you’ve already marked as complete, then you may have a problem on your hands.
There are two ways you can find yourself in this situation. Either your project is kind of buggy, or your client keeps asking you for additional adjustments after you’ve finished your part.
If it’s the first one, then the solution is to assign more testing time from the start of every project. It’s not good for anyone to submit buggy work. Not for the client, obviously, and not for you, since you’ll be working overtime to fix it and it will reflect poorly on your own reputation.
If it’s the second, you need to be clearer from the get-go about what you’re willing to do and what you’re not. That is to say, when you’re initially speaking to your client, you need to firmly state that your work is done once the project is completed and that any further changes, adjustments or tweaks should either be made by someone else or they cost extra, should they choose to ask you to do them.
Like we said, there’s a lot to do when working as a project manager and these are some of the most frequent issues you will run into. If you can think of any other common problems and their solutions, go ahead and post them in the comment section below, we’d love to hear about them!
i appreciate it.