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Projects are unpredictable even in the best circumstances, and they come with a whole host of project management challenges you've run into at least once (but likely more than once).

Whether your projects are always running over budget or getting derailed by risks you didn't account for, there are some common solves for these challenges that can make them a little easier to manage (one of which, project management software, is worth mentioning off the top).

Most Common Project Management Challenges

In a recent survey, we identified a variety of project management challenges ranging from budget challenges to resource challenges to challenges with vendors and service providers.

Here’s the broad categories we ended up with:

bar chart showing results of project management challenges survey
Here’s a chart showing all of the responses from the project management challenges survey.
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1. Challenges Amongst The Project Team

Challenges amongst the project team included issues with:

  • team dynamics and collaboration
  • building teams
  • team morale
  • managing remote teams

Some common challenges noted by respondents included difficulty finding a good team, toxic climates or clashing personalities, or a lack of accountability within the project team.

Part of overcoming these challenges comes down to how well-versed in leadership a project manager is, as well as to whether there is a clear hierarchy and system of accountability in place.

When teams are experiencing poor communication or miscommunication issues and are not collaborating at the appropriate level, this can result in project failure.

Challenges around collaboration were also a common response in our survey.

bar chart highlighting collaboration
Collaboration was also a common challenge mentioned in our survey.

6.1% of responses noted that collaboration was their biggest challenge. This included things like collaboration between stakeholders, clients, and the team; team members; and general communication challenges.

2. Resource Management Challenges

Common resource management challenges included:

  • allocating resources for projects
  • team members being split between competing priorities
  • staying productive
  • projects running concurrently
bar chart highlighting resources
In total, 10.1% of responses mentioned some type of challenge involving project resources.

One respondent likened their organization to “a marketing project ER,” and went on to note that while they have set processes in place, they don’t always have the time to follow them.

This was corroborated by a respondent, who noted that “wearing many hats is the rule” for their agency, with “the challenge being allocating focused time when there are several projects choking bandwidth.”

While some of this can be solved by proper project planning, some of this comes down to the project budget. Smaller budget projects often have fewer dedicated resources, even though they may have a scope of work that requires more resources.

bar chart highlighting budget
Many survey respondents mentioned budget challenges.

It’s worth mentioning that budget challenges were also among the top survey results, with 4.3% of responses saying managing project budgets was their biggest challenge.

3. Lack of Experience

This challenge describes situations where the project manager lacks the necessary skills and needs to improve, especially when it comes to:

Several respondents noted a lack of confidence as their biggest challenge, and three responses, in particular, noted being new to project management.

bar chart highlighting personal skills
In total, 6.6% of responses involved some type of challenge around personal skills.

One respondent noted they were “having trouble expanding [their] skills from basic managing to managing small scale projects.”

This is a tricky transition for project managers, as processes can be harder to follow when there are more projects and less resources.

The takeaway is that project managers need to stay flexible, no matter the type or scale of the digital project they are managing.

As busy as project managers are, having time for personal learning and project management training is critical to one’s continued growth and to project success.

4. Processes

bar chart highlighting processes
A sizeable portion of survey responses spoke specifically of challenges around project processes.

5.3% of respondents noted that their biggest project management challenge was with processes, whether specific project processes or company processes.

Several responses noted that their organization was lacking processes and that it fell to project managers to create and implement these processes.

Others were frustrated by a lack of others following established processes.

5. Scope

bar chart highlighting scope
Almost 4% of responses mentioned scope as a main challenge.

3.8% of respondents said that scope was their biggest challenge.

This subcategory included the challenges of staying in project scope, avoiding scope creep, and managing last-minute changes to scope.

One response noted the waterfall effect that scope changes have and the ensuing stakeholder management that occurs when scope changes require budget or timeline changes.

What's Next?

For helping solving these and other common project management challenges, sign up for our membership community and join the conversation in Slack with 100s of other digital project managers.

By Nuala Turner

Nuala is the Editor of The Digital Project Manager. Her background is in content strategy, content production, and managing projects. She brings a strong editorial eye and a passion for connecting with experts in the field and teasing out their stories, as well as ensuring digital project managers are winning at work and smashing projects out of the park.