Acknowledging failure is a part of the learning process. But how can you do that in project management? Understanding why your projects or resource planning fail and learning from your past mistakes is the best way to avert any project management failures in the future. If you observe recurring project management failures or lapses in your business, then you should reflect on why this is happening and what may have gone wrong. Then, take suitable steps to eliminate the issues from the root. Any successful project not only has a great project manager but dedicated team members who are aware of their strengths and weaknesses. New projects will have some level of risk, but you can only take care of things that are in your control, careful project, and resource planning, having risk mitigation strategies, and learning from past project management failures go a long way in making your projects successful.
Top reasons why projects fail?
- Poor project and resource planning
Mostly, project managers fail to do extensive planning at the beginning of any project. It is important that all stakeholders are in complete alignment with business goals. This helps to make required adjustments to project and resource plans, budgets, and schedules. However, as most, project managers fail in doing so, their project timeline planning, resource allocation, project management, and supply chain failures start happening.
- Poor scheduling
After planning or goal setting, managers need to create a well-thought-out schedule. To make sure that the project moves ahead as per the planned timeline and budget, you should set goals and project milestones. Project managers usually miss doing a realistic assessment of the entire project to establish the time it will take to execute. Hence, they are unable to divide their project into various milestones because of which the entire scheduling fails.
- Poor project management
Poor project management including people management, not having enough clarity into resource availability, schedules, and ineffective management of projects and teams is another reason for project management failure. A good project manager should be able to motivate and lead the team members to ensure that all the tasks and milestones are completed on time. It is the manager who needs to be responsible for the overall project. Thus, inefficient project management happens when the supervisor is not able to manage the project’s schedules and budget.
- Poor resource planning and alignment
You may have defined the project objectives and done perfect scheduling, but if you do not have the right team or resources aligned on the project, everything will come falling. All resources aligned on the project should know their goals and responsibilities. They should possess the right skills for that project and operate in a team environment. However, selecting the right people with appropriate competencies isn’t easy. Choosing the right resource management software for project management and resource planning will make your job a lot easier and more efficient.
- Lack of visibility
Another big reason for project management failure is a lack of visibility into the overall resource pool, projects, verticals in the business, and availability and capacity. Failures happen when people do not have access to the right information that can help them gain clarity. Implementing the right resource management software is the solution. Such a tool acts as a single online repository to save your data and documents in one place. It also offers a list of all resources and projects in your organization along with ample security and accessibility to authorized people as per their roles and requirement.
- Failure to adapt to project changes
There may be some changes or updates that the client suggests at the last stage or in between the project lifecycle. Hence, the project requirements may change. But if you can’t adapt to such adhoc changes as the project moves along, your project may derail due to not meeting the timelines or because of a lack of right resources who can adapt to those changes. Thus, it is recommended that you make certain arrangements well in advance and be ready with how you will handle any such changes or scope creep.
How can a resource management software like eResource Scheduler help?
- Know the root cause for failure
The first step to avoiding project management failures is to dig deeper into previous project failures and understand what the most common issue or challenge is. Some common challenges usually are poor resource planning, poor project or risk management, incorrect scheduling, etc. Therefore, finding what are the weak points in your business or team and what are the pitfalls or patterns that keep repeating in your project management is the key. It’s good to know your specific challenges or root causes to be able to chart out the right mitigation plan.
- Foresee resource demand to avoid any shortage of resources
Another key challenge is faulty resource planning. This could be the incorrect calculation of resource requirements, delay in raising the resource requisitions, incorrect skill mapping, and hiring people who do not have the right skill sets. In such a case, the right resource allocation tool can help you find resources with the required expertise, skills, experience, and interest. Before hiring, you can use the tool’s advanced filters and see if there are any resources in any other department or projects who may have availability. Such a tool helps to take well-thought off resourcing decisions and bridge the skill gaps effectively.
- Training, upskilling, retraining, and rotations
Most organizations struggle with highly skilled or niche resources, as they are always high in demand. So, to enable bridging the skills gap and ensure that no shortage of resources happens when projects come in, companies should plan to train, upskill, and retrain resources so that they have cross-functional skills. Job rotations also help in avoiding wasteful hiring processes and ensure that your projects are delivered successfully.
- Increased clarity into resource schedules and availability
Leading resource management software such as eResource Scheduler not only helps in resource planning, scheduling, allocation, and project management but also acts as a time tracking tool. These days with distributed teams, businesses operate with people spread even in different geographies. In such a case, having visibility into all projects running, their status, and the resources are next to impossible. Imagine if you have a tool that helps you find qualified resources with a certain skill set in just a few clicks. eResource Scheduler Cloud is a multi-user, customizable resource management software that acts as a centralized platform to save all information about your resources, projects, availability, schedules, cost, etc. Having such a list makes it very easy to find the right resources across multiple work locations, departments, and teams and avoid project management failures.
- Insights from data collected, dashboards, and project reports
When any project management failure happens, the most challenging part to handle is the surprise factor. Because of poor resource planning or incorrect reporting of project status, people don’t have enough clarity on project milestones. However, with resource management software, such issues can be easily resolved. eResource Scheduler is one such resource allocation software that offers visual overviews, dashboards, data, and reports with historical data about various successful and failed projects, resources, etc. that can be of big help. In just a few easy steps, you can pull out any detailed report on resource availability, utilization, capacity, or productivity. These comprehensive reports help you make the right decisions and work towards enhancing your profitability and performance. What’s more? You can also accurately estimate real-time resource utilization, plan for future resourcing needs, do automated skill matching, and manage your capacity seamlessly.
- Estimate the cost and revenue for your projects precisely
When you implement an AI-enabled resource management software, you can calculate the hourly cost, billing rates, and profitability easily. eResource Scheduler is a cloud-based, award-winning resource allocation software that has an inbuilt financial module. This feature helps in defining your hourly cost and deriving accurate billing rates for your business at the resource and project level. With all this data in hand, you can estimate the total cost of scheduling resources, revenue per resource or per team, and overall cost and revenue for individual projects.
- Awareness about what should be scaled and exactly when
Because of seasonal peaks and troughs, there could be times when your team is overloaded in contrast to other lean periods. Also, when you win newer projects and clients, work volume suddenly goes up. However, overload or overbookings on a regular basis may lead to employee dissatisfaction, attrition, or burn-out. eResource Scheduler is a resource management software that helps in making a thorough project and resource plan, which helps you know the exact resource requirements. Thus, you will know when to do the hiring, in what numbers, with what skills, and by when.
- Forecasts powered by artificial intelligence (AI)
Before your new projects are started, you need to have a project plan, and effort estimation ready, and then schedule resources accordingly. However, problems arise if this calculation is incorrect. Your timelines, cost, and overall plan will be hampered. eResource Scheduler is a resource management software that uses advanced AI algorithms and provides accurate estimations. With this top-rated tool, you can draft precise schedules, manage resource planning and scheduling, and capture resource utilization in real-time, and more effectively.
- Better collaboration and communication
With resource management software such as eResource Scheduler, team members find it quite easy to communicate and collaborate. Working with your remote resources becomes easy too. A cloud-based resource allocation software acts as a single online platform that can be used by all your resources based in multiple locations. Anyone can access the tool to get any data, review files, share comments, send any data or files, and even organize a meeting or event in a few simple clicks.
- Monitor profitability of all your projects in real-time
Tracking the profitability of all your ongoing projects is quite difficult. Having an idea if you have gone above the budget or are still profitable will help. The right resource management software like eResource Scheduler avoids any project management failures by providing you with such data in real-time. This way, you can find resolutions to various issues and course-correct when you still have time in hand. This tool enables you to have every project, customer, or cost as a separate profit centre and pull out relevant data to analyse if your project is profitable or not.
- Various reports to identify resource gaps, availability, and bottom line of the business
The right resource management software can surely help in avoiding any project management failures. The gap report offered by eResource Scheduler flags any current resource gaps does a comparative analysis and helps to fix the loopholes. You can easily pull out detailed reports for planned or actual utilization, compare capacity or pull data from timesheets, and scheduling charts. Availability reports of this tool show you how much work your team can take on in real-time. The financial reports enable in the identification of the bottom line of the business. These reports also display planned vis-a-vis actual cost, revenue, profitability at various levels, etc.
Implement eResource Scheduler to avoid any project management failures
Lastly, this tool also helps in adapting to any last-minute changes in your ongoing projects. You can sign up for a free trial soon and enjoy individualized support for system configuration as per your business requirements. You can also gain benefit from its brilliant features such as unlimited projects, unlimited users, resource requests, bookings, user access rights, timesheet module, and gap reporting. The software’s robust architecture and steadfast performance make it a globally- preferred tool for streamlining operations, resource management, and enhancing organizational efficiencies. So, if you want optimal utilization of your resources and do seamless project tracking at every stage, choose eResource Scheduler.
