In most cases, failed project management is pinned on the project manager. Hypothetical situation: John, a project manager, works at a SaaS firm and oversees a software development project. After the software is ready, John realizes that some functionality features aren’t working the way he wanted to. This disappoints him and the stakeholders of the project. When he asks the developers why this happened, they report they just did what they were told.
Should John be the only one to be held responsible for the failure of the project? There are various reasons why a project can fail. Let’s skim through the most frequent reasons that lead to project failure.
An Inefficient Project Management Team
Efficiency is important. A project can never meet its deadlines with quality if the team working on it isn’t efficient. No project comes with task dependencies, so if someone under performs, the whole team and the project may face consequences.
In fact, only 40% of projects meet their schedule and quality goals. This can cause an organization to lose clients, get its budget cut down and lose a lot of team morale.
Change in Project Objectives
During the project execution phase, a lot of things can happen. Some of these are changes taking place in a project’s objectives. When this happens, the entire team should be informed in time, assets and resources should be assessed and a new timeline should be established. Failure in any of these leads a project to downfall.
Change in Overall Budget
A change in overall budget can cause a project to completely fail in the middle of its execution. If the PM and their team don’t have the knowledge and necessary tools to restructure the project plan, the results will be far from expected. This applies to either cut down or increased budgets.
Poor Budget Allocation
Poor budget allocation also serves as a common reason that leads to project failure. Each task in the project requires a specific amount of money from the designated budget. Poor budget allocation can prevent a specific task from being executed. In this scenario, it’s almost inevitable that the project will miss the deadline.
The only question is whether it will be days or months past the deadline. The fact that less than 30% of projects finish before the deadline and on budget testifies to how common this mistake has become.
Failed Communication
Do you remember our unfortunate project manager, John? His project failed because there was no communication between him and the project team during the planning and execution phases. Chances are the project documentation lacked some crucial information for the team. The result? A product that is completely different than the one on the blueprints.
But is there a way to fix all this?
The only way to encompass all these problems is to use a simple project management software. In fact, when it comes to business performance and organizational success, 97% of businesses strongly believe that project management is critical. But how can a simple project management software tool help with above mentioned project failure factors?
Let’s view some of the ways in which a simple project management software can help to tackle these issues easily.
Reliability, Ease of Use and Ease of Integration
The latest solutions provided in a project management software are developed and designed to be reliable, easy to use and easy to integrate with other platforms (e.g. Salesforce and Xero). These are the top three requirements that businesses look for when searching for a simple PM software.
This enables a smooth and fast onboarding process after the implementation of the software. It also enables the project managers and its teams to focus more on work and less on management and execution process.
Improved Overall Performance
With a software that integrates the use of all the tools needed for success, the performance of the entire team is sure to improve. The time tracking tool helps you complete tasks within the specific period. Team members find this useful as they see how productive they are, and how much time they have until they finish the project. Time tracking has been proven as a successful technique that improves time management. Also, it reduces revenue leakage and increases overall performance.
Anytime, Anywhere Accessibility
Other than these amazing benefits, any device allows access to asimple project management software. This helps in case your clients ask you to make some tweaks to an ongoing task when you’re out of office. Just go to the task, add a comment or ask your clients to update it through their designated user id.
This way those on a leave or anywhere in the office can see the updates in real-time. What’s more? Nobody will miss on these updates anymore. It is also one of the better ways to save time and deliver projects on time.
Documentation Sharing & Top-Notch Communication
With built in cloud storage, project managers and team members can upload project documentation and prevent inconvenient oversight mistakes. These documents are available for both desktop and mobile users. No more will your team spend hours searching through a long email chain to spot the correct document. With a project management tool, one place stores all of your documents.
Communication with a built-in notification system, another great feature, supplies everyone on the project team with the latest information. This feature can be also used to quickly address questions and problems that arise as the project progresses further.
Real-Time Insight in Project Status
Project Management software dashboards provide a great way to understand project status easily. With one look, you’ll figure out which project is assigned to which team, who is a part of each team, the progress rate and more.
You can also make minor edits through the dashboard. No longer do you have to open the project separately and make changes to the due date. Other than that, the dashboard also provides the status of all tasks, budget spent/remaining, deadlines, progress, chat notifications and much more.
Seeing a project in real-time lets you quickly react and fix issues, making it easier to complete the project on time and on budget.
Let’s Conclude…
In many scenarios, responsibility falls on the project manager when a deliverable fails to reach the client on time. Reason? Well, they are the ones responsible for managing everything in the end and are answerable to the client. But if they look out for some factors that tend to mess up the course of their project, they won’t fail to deliver.
To make sure that they avoid these factors, the integration of project management software is important. As described above, it comes with various benefits that are hard to miss. So, before any of your rivals take over your clients, make sure that you’ve got the right software that helps you provide quality deliverable to clients hassle-free.
Photo courtesy of Pexels user Ruslan Burlaka