Project Management – The Pitfalls To Watch For

Any endeavor that has a well-defined objective and often involves proper and timely utilization of resources can be properly managed by employing sound project management techniques. But more often than not, when after implementing a structured project management approach there will be some barriers that continue to hinder the progress of the project.

These barriers might be in the form of a sudden change in the scope of a project or might also be in the form of insufficient human resources available at hand. Sometimes, the company executing the project might not get the required hardware on time to start the testing of the project deliverables. Thus, there are several external factors that play a major role in hindering the progress of the project.

The changing project scope is one of the most commonly encountered problems by the project executor. At the start of the design phase of the project, the customer and the service provider might have agreed to a particular scope of work. But as the project develops, customer finds that the output generated is not up to their requirements. At this stage, they ask the service provider to include certain things that were not part of the initial contract.

The project execution team should have already put in place a process to handle these change requests from the customer. As it is not part of the initial plan, the project management personnel should convey to the customers that this is not part of the initial contract. This new work can be taken as separate phase in the project and the amendments are made in the contract to reflect the changed approach.

Similar to the requirements or the scope of the approach, another major factor that impacts the progress of the project is the availability of human resources at the right time When the company has planned to recruit 10 resources during the project planning phase, but during the project building phase they find only 7 resources in place, the project management team has not properly tracked the project.

There could be many reasons for the less number of resources. Some may have promised to join, but might join some other company and some might join, buy might have quit within a few days due to some personal reasons. The project management team should consider all these risks at the planning phase and try to handle the risk. Proper risk management techniques have to be implemented to handle such situations.

By: Mark J Gregory

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Mark Gregory is writing on behalf of Pro Act 2 it, who offer Property maintenance Bristol and building services Bristol