9 Causes of Project Delays & How To Avoid Them
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Collaboration and well-defined roles within the team are crucial for preventing delays, overcoming hurdles, and delivering projects on time.
Consistency is Key: Monitor your project and adapt your plans as necessary. This helps you keep your project aligned with overall business goals and lets you quickly pivot if issues arise.
Plan Ahead: Investing time in defining a clear project scope and setting realistic timelines can significantly improve the chances of project success.
You know the statistics—since up to 70% of projects fail to deliver their intended outcomes, project delays may seem like an inevitable consequence of doing business. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In this article, I’ll explore common causes of project delays and share what you can do to adhere to project timelines and avoid cost overruns. A lot of the time, it comes down to having the right project management software.
1. Miscommunications
Poor communication is one of the most common causes of project delays. Miscommunications arise when stakeholders are not aligned on desired project goals and/or fail to hold themselves accountable for completing project tasks.
Why It Causes Delays
If team members do not agree on project purpose or are unclear on who does what, it can lead to confusion. Activities may not be completed on time or at all, or there may be a failure to coordinate with other teams to navigate handoff points for task dependencies.
How to Overcome It
During the project planning phase:
- Work with stakeholders to document project goals in the project charter
- Create a work breakdown structure to segregate project deliverables into discrete tasks
- Put together a RACI chart that clearly defines who is responsible and accountable for key tasks
- Define a project communication plan.
During project execution and monitoring, hold periodic check-ins with the project team to keep stakeholders informed of project progress and make sure you're meeting project deadlines.
2. Insufficient Project Planning
Poor planning is a surefire way to compromise delivery of a successful project. To achieve project success, take the time to understand why you’re doing the project, what success looks like, and the process you’ll follow for implementation.
Why It Causes Delays
If you’ve failed to think through your approach to change, any sort of disruption creates a lag in the schedule that threatens to push out project timeframes.
How To Overcome It
Before starting work on a new initiative, create a project plan that details how you will handle various aspects of a project, including but not limited to project scope, project schedule, budget, resource management, communications, and risk management.
3. Unexpected Scope Changes
Unexpected scope changes happen when stakeholders decide to officially modify the scope of the project beyond what was initially agreed upon.
Related, but more disruptive, is scope creep—when scope changes unofficially make their way into your project deliverables, but the schedule and budget don’t adjust to accommodate those changes.
Why It Causes Delays
Adding a feature or two to satisfy a stakeholder whim may not seem like a big deal at the time, but taken together, these incremental, often last-minute changes start to add up and can compromise quality and cause missed or pushed back deadlines.
How To Overcome It
To combat scope creep, clearly document what is in and out of scope in your project plan. Be careful when generating project estimates to avoid assessments that may be overly optimistic, and make contingency plans to account for any unexpected delays. Finally, maintain a decision log that keeps track of evolving thinking around scope during project execution.
4. Outdated Software Tools
You may be doing just fine managing your projects with an Excel spreadsheet and a handmade Gantt chart.
But, as your projects start to grow in size and complexity, and your organization scales to manage a larger project portfolio, you may find that your existing project management tools are starting to fall short.
Why It Causes Delays
Outdated software tools may lack functionality that saves time during project execution, such as the ability to generate project visualizations or set automated alerts when project costs approach predetermined thresholds.
The more stretched your capacity as a project manager, the more likely you are to overlook a dependency or a deadline that can leave you scrambling to meet project milestones.
How To Overcome It
Invest in project management software to take some of the guesswork out of managing project timelines.
5. Unforeseen Circumstances
You might argue that any event that happens in the course of project execution has the potential to be unforeseen.
What we are referring to here, however, are so-called force majeure events, such as natural disasters, that are outside of one’s control and cannot be predicted in advance.
Why It Causes Delays
Unforeseen circumstances pack a powerful punch. They may render your project goals obsolete and crater your timelines. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, a global event that was arguably outside of anyone’s control to prevent or even predict, is an example of a set of unforeseen circumstances that upended many project plans.
How To Overcome It
While there’s not much you can do to predict circumstances that are by definition unforeseen, you can still build contingency plans into your project that may help mitigate the impact of any unknown unknowns that arise.
An example might be adapting an in person event for remote participation to account for any unforeseen travel delays related to health, weather, or other causes.
6. Inaccurate Estimates
Project estimation involves determining the resources required for successful project delivery and the associated costs. Inaccurate estimates arise when you misjudge the resources required for project completion.
Why It Causes Delays
Generating accurate estimates is challenging because it requires you to make predictions about the future, and as of this writing, no one has quite figured out how to do that yet.
Underestimating how much time and effort it takes to complete a task forces you to play catch-up when you fail to meet originally scoped deadlines. In these instances, you can sometimes maintain your baseline project schedule by crashing, or adding more resources, to the schedule or fast-tracking tasks so they happen concurrently.
But, even if you avoid the need to extend project timelines, adding to your team’s workload is a recipe for burnout and poor performance that may ultimately require rework. Not a good situation either way.
How To Overcome It
To make your estimates more accurate, clearly define project scope and requirements to make sure everyone is aligned on the project’s intended goals. Use historical data to inform your estimates, when possible. Finally, assemble a project team with the right skillset to complete project deliverables.
7. Unrealistic Deadlines
Unrealistic deadlines arise when you craft a schedule to appease stakeholder demands, rather than reflect the realities of how long it will take to execute the project with the time, budget, and resources available.
Why It Causes Delays
Setting unrealistic deadlines fails to consider resource capacity and/or resource availability. It may also fail to consider how long a task will take to complete, even if the right resource is assigned. This makes it highly unlikely that you will meet desired project timelines.
How To Overcome It
Set realistic deadlines rooted in historical data, and take care to manage stakeholder expectations from project outset. Include contingency to give yourself some buffer in the event that a task takes longer than anticipated.
If your stakeholder insists upon including a deadline that is unrealistic, document this as a risk and report on that risk throughout the project to avoid surprises.
8. Unclear Priorities
Unclear priorities are a byproduct of failing to align stakeholders on desired project goals and how those project goals support the organization’s business objectives.
Why It Causes Delays
If your stakeholders are not aligned on what the project is trying to accomplish, then it becomes difficult to prioritize that project or tasks within that project. Team members do not have the guidance they need to accomplish their tasks, which slows down the pace of execution and negatively impacts the project timeline.
How To Overcome It
During the project planning phase, build consensus around project objectives and carefully document what is in and out of scope for the project based on those objectives. You’ll then translate the project vision into a set of activities that team members are responsible for completing.
Throughout project execution, monitor performance of assigned activities, remove impediments to execution, and report on project progress to make sure activities are progressing in a timely manner.
9. Project Bottlenecks
Project bottlenecks slow the pace of work by preventing project tasks and deliverables from moving forward. Common causes of project bottlenecks include lack of resource availability, competing project priorities, poorly defined roles and responsibilities, or pending approvals.
Why It Causes Delays
If a team member is awaiting signoff from a project decision maker or is unclear which tasks they are supposed to complete, it prevents dependent tasks from moving forward, creating a ripple effect throughout your project schedule.
How To Overcome It
During project planning, map available resources to tasks optimal for their skillset. Establish clear communication protocols to avoid potential misunderstandings during project execution.
As you’re working the plan, reallocate resources in real time to account for project progress and any competing priorities. Adjust processes, as needed, to optimize for faster task delivery.
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