What Are Bottlenecks In Project Management & How To Manage

Project management bottlenecks can include resource constraints, delays in approvals, or scope creep, to name a few. They’ll slow down your project and can lead to missed deadlines and budget overages if you’re not careful. 

Below, I’ll discuss the types of bottlenecks in project management, how to manage them, and why it’s essential to have a plan to mitigate bottlenecks if (and when) they occur.

What Is A Bottleneck In Project Management?

Project bottlenecks are blockages that slow the flow of work, often leading to a buildup of deliverables, resources, and tasks stuck behind them. Bottlenecks can be caused by resources being unavailable, conflicting priorities, unclear roles and responsibilities, or delayed approvals. 

Bottlenecks are like having too many limes in your Corona bottle—barely any tasty Corona is coming out of the bottleneck because the limes are not letting the cold beer through. Frustrating, right? So are the bottlenecks in your project.

Types of Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks in project management can be placed into two different categories:

1. Performer-based bottlenecks are related to people on or adjacent to the project. Examples include resource constraints, inefficient and unclear communication, delays in approvals (from clients or team members), and a lack of role accountability. 
2. Systems-based bottlenecks are related to the processes, technology, and tools surrounding a project. These include process inefficiencies, scope creep, technology issues causing bugs, low-quality output, and delays. 

What Problems Do Bottlenecks Cause?

No matter how much planning you do and how many risk mitigation plans you put into place, bottlenecks will still arise. Here are some examples of the problems that bottlenecks bring with them.

Over Budget and Dissatisfied Stakeholders

Bottlenecks can lead to increased labour and resource costs, prolonged project timelines, and inefficiencies in workflows. Increased costs also reduce project profitability.

You’ll either need to ask the client for more money (which no one wants to do), or your organization will need to eat the extra costs. Either way, your stakeholders are not happy. 

Here are some solutions to this:

• Use workback schedules and root cause analysis to help pinpoint potential bottlenecks, resource constraints, and inefficiencies before they escalate.
• Communicate early and often (and throughout the project planning phase) with clients to help facilitate potential budget conversations down the road about obtaining more budget.
• Implement workload management strategies to make sure the team has the right amount of work on their plates and isn’t getting burned out.

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Missed Deadlines and Loss of Team Morale

Quality of work and team morale both suffer when team members try to catch up on deadlines that were missed due to a lack of proper prioritization. This also leads to budget overages and can have a cascading effect on project progress. Clients or stakeholders may also lose trust and confidence if the bottlenecks causing these quality issues aren’t resolved quickly.

Here are some solutions to this:

• Review tasks regularly with team members in weekly meetings or daily stand-ups.
• Prioritize early and often.
• Communicate potential risks to stakeholders and clients early and often so they are not caught off guard at the last minute.  
• Move any non-priority tasks into a backlog so the team doesn’t mistake them for priorities.
• Empower the team to provide feedback on what is working and what isn’t. They’re the ones doing the work, so they have insight into bottlenecks that could or are about to occur.

How To Manage Bottlenecks

Managing resources and bottlenecks is difficult when you are in the thick of the project workflow. Here how to mitigate, avoid, and manage them during your project.

During Project Planning

Plan for Resource Optimization

Conduct a thorough analysis of team member's skills and strengths before your project starts. Make sure you have the right resources scheduled for the right tasks at the right time and with the right tools.

This is best done with resource management and resource scheduling tools like Resource Guru, Float, and Productive, project management tools like Gantt charts, or task-based planning tools like Asana or Monday.com.

Expert Tip

You can cross-train the team on other skills or roles or use resources that are strong in multiple disciplines so they can confidently move into tasks that they weren’t assigned initially without sacrificing the quality of the work. This helps avoid project and resource conflicts.

Establish Clear Communication Channels

Map out a communication plan, meeting cadence, and escalation procedure so everyone involved in your project understands their responsibilities, how to communicate any issues, and who to escalate to when problems arise.

Miro and FigJam are great process mapping tools, and Slack and Microsoft Teams are great collaborative tools for communicating status, issues, or feedback on a project.

Expert Tip

Get your team members and stakeholders to sign off on your communication plan and escalation procedure. Set up different Slack or Teams channels for discussing different topics, set automated messages to remind your team to send status updates, and set up workflows to track issues and bottleneck progress efficiently.

Set Up Contingency Plans

Identify your project's critical path and any dependencies within to set the project up for success and reduce bottlenecks that may occur. Implement contingency plans if you identify a bottleneck that can't be avoided. 

The critical path method (CPM), one of many resource allocation methods, allows you to identify the key tasks in a project and dedicates resources to them so that time, scope, and budget are met. Also, ask to participate in the scoping process before your organization sells the project so you can review the budget and scope and make sure it’s realistic!

Expert Tip

If your company allows for it, have a contingency plan to use third-party vendors or freelancers that you can easily add to your project when resource constraints are a bottleneck. You can also go one step further—when the project is being scoped, make sure a budget buffer is added to accommodate a contingency like this.

Use Historical Data and Experience for Bottleneck Analysis

Document past experiences and identify when bottlenecks occurred, what the impact was, and how you solved them for past projects. This will help the entire project management team learn from past experiences and implement lessons learned for future projects.

Notion is a great wiki tool for organizing lessons learned for projects and allows everyone on the team access to these learnings. You should also conduct retrospectives using a collaborative tool like FigJam or Miro. This helps identify what worked well and what needs improvement, and you can update future project processes and workflows so bottlenecks don’t occur, are planned for, or have solutions on hand to implement immediately.

Expert Tip

Have a dedicated person within your project management department who keeps track of lessons learned for the purpose of continuous improvement. Set up a process for when a retrospective is completed—this person should document the lessons learned and solutions in one place so everyone can access them when scoping or planning a project.

During Project Execution

Quickly Identify and Complete Bottleneck Analysis

Bottlenecks happen. Don’t stress—if you’ve planned for it, you're in a good spot. If you haven’t, here are some ways to quickly identify and assess the problem and keep the project moving:

• Monitor project progress often to help identify bottlenecks before they do too much damage.
• Conduct immediate root cause analysis and get team feedback to determine the exact issue and why the bottleneck occurred. If you know why it happened, you can likely prevent it from happening again and be able to better explain to stakeholders as you’re communicating what you need to resolve it.

Reallocate Resources

In many cases, simply adding more resources can help solve the bottleneck. Here how to do this:

• Complete a priority analysis of the tasks directly related to the bottleneck so you can allocate resources to them directly.
• If you’re pulling resources from other projects, complete a resource prioritization and priority analysis of all relevant projects at the company level to make sure your solution won’t cause further delays or have a cascading effect on other issues.

Try a tool like Float, which provides real-time visibility into team member workloads and resource availability. Trello with Butler can also help you automate and track workload distribution across tasks and TeamGantt offers a visual overview of workloads and schedules.

Expert Tip

When you’re redistributing resources to high-priority tasks, make sure you don’t overcommit them. This will only create additional bottlenecks and delays, as well as more fatigue and overwhelm for team members.

Implement Short-Term Process Adjustments

You may need to turn your project process on its head on the fly to resolve a bottleneck, but be prepared to control the additional impact.

Try switching to an agile project management method, which uses sprints and iterative planning to adjust resource needs dynamically for the remainder of the project. This allows you to adapt quickly to any new bottlenecks and resolve the current one quickly.

Use Trello to create a separate Kanban board to manage immediate bottlenecks, as well as integration and workflow tools like Zapier to set temporary automation rules for bottlenecks.

Tools For Managing Bottlenecks

There is an abundance of resource management software that will make resolving bottlenecks easier and automate time-consuming tasks like planning capacity in Kanban, prioritizing tasks and projects, and rescheduling deadlines.

Here are some other standout features of these software tools:

• They give you and your stakeholders visibility into progress and the issues causing bottlenecks (and earlier than if you were tracking this manually, in many cases).
• They enable automation and free up your time by handling tasks like resource reallocation and dependency adjustments that previously required manual effort.
• The software has data analytics capabilities that help you forecast resources for the future, analyze past data to make informed decisions on new projects, and implement parameters to avoid past issues or bottlenecks.

Here are my picks for the top resource management software on the market:

1. 1. monday.com — Best for simple workload planning
2. 2. Float — Best for intuitive resource management
3. 3. Parallax — Best for predictive resource management
4. 4. Scoro — Best for forecasting team utilization
5. 5. Runn — Best for real-time project tracking
6. 6. Kantata — Best for real-time resource utilization
7. 7. Resource Guru — Best for hassle-free resource booking
8. 8. Productive — Best resource planning and capacity forecasting
9. 9. MRPeasy — Best for small manufacturers
10. 10. Bonsai Agency Software — Best for workload optimization

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