Hello fellow project management professionals, how’s it going? How is your week going? Today’s post is focused on how to observe and tackle obstacles and challenges that arise on your project/workstream. Enjoy!
As a project manager, it is important to keep track of the project schedule and make sure that the key tasks and milestones are on track and being met consistently. If every project didn’t have obstacles, then we wouldn’t have a need for project managers! Here are a set of steps that are typically followed to address obstacles that come up in projects:
- Assess the obstacle. When a risk or issue comes up in a project, it is important to understand how big the obstacle is. Is it related to resource constraints? Is the vendor pushing back on scope? As a project manager, you need to determine how this obstacle can affect your project.
- Determine the impacts to project schedule. Based on the current circumstances, how will this risk/issue impact your project timeline? If the obstacle is already impacting the project, will it cause you to miss any of your key milestone dates?
- Determine the impacts to project financials. Will this obstacle cause you to spend more dollars in the form of labor hours or by making adjustments to the technology solution that you have already agreed to with the vendor?
- Determine the impact to project resources. Will this obstacle cause your resources’ time to be shifted to focus on the potential obstacle? How will the work of those specific resources be re-distributed so the rest of the work that have major dependencies don’t get impacted?
- Determine potential mitigation/remediation plans. Based on the above analysis conducted for potential areas of impact, it is important to determine what the steps will be taken to mitigate the risk or address/resolve the issue. Besides this, as a project manager, it is critical to inform the project leadership and executive stakeholders about the risks/issues so they are aware and can provide support (if needed).
It is important to have a 360 degree understanding of how the project is impacted by potential obstacles and identifying the upstream/downstream impacts. By understanding this level of perspective, project managers can provide a more accurate estimate of how this will impact the project schedule and financials.
Hope this post was helpful and insightful in tackling situations and difficult obstacles on your project. How do you tackle obstacles on your project and/or team? Please provide your feedback in the comments below! Looking forward to hearing from you!
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