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