How to Avoid These 4 Common Project Management Mistakes

Project-based companies live or die by how they manage their projects. Here's how WORKetc can help you avoid 4 common project management mistakes that can kill a business.

Project-based companies live or die by how they manage their projects. Chances are you already have a project management process or even software in place, but that doesn’t mean you’re completely safe from some unexpected hiccups along the way.

Here are four of the most common mistakes in project management, and how WORKetc’s suit of solutions can help you avoid them.

Putting the Wrong Person In Charge

Any project management software is only as good as the people who use it, and if the designated project manager isn’t up to snuff, there’s not much the system can do to save a project from failing. Therefore, it falls to company leadership to make sure that their projects are placed in capable hands.

WORKetc’s Reports and Smart List features let you collate the data you need to evaluate your team members’ performance on previous projects for possible project management roles in the future. You can check past timesheets to measure productivity, or just see whether someone is currently assigned to any projects at all.

As the name suggests, timesheet reports are very useful when you want to check employee timesheets. Different reports let you see different data, meaning you can do things like check a list of total hours per activity, see timesheet data per project or per day, and even review time logged per client, including hours and amounts per individual employee.

On the other hand, smart lists give you even more control for when you want to slice-and-dice the data further. For example, you can create a smart list that shows all projects tagged “Graphic Design” and “Print Campaign”, and with a budget greater than $1,000 total, on which a specific employee worked.

Let’s say you’re choosing between two members of your in-house graphic design team, Terry and Grace, to head an upcoming print-only marketing project with a large budget. You can create a smart list that shows all of the past print-only projects that each team member has worked on, with budgets close to the one set for your upcoming project.

The data then shows that Terry has only handled a project with a budget as big as this new one twice before, while Grace already has experience with three projects of this scale. Upon checking the individual projects, however, you discover Terry’s projects were always delivered well within budget and on time. Meanwhile, Grace had gone over budget and delivered a couple of days late on her last two projects, so you decided to give Terry the job.

Misunderstood Requirements

So now you have your project manager, it’s time to start the project, right?

Wrong! First, you have to make sure that everyone involved in the project understands all of the project requirements, as well as its scope. Everything about the project might immediately make sense to your new Project Manager Terry, but does your new Graphic Designer John understand it?

A kick-off meeting is perfect for checking if everyone is on the same page. WORKetc’s “attach anything to anything” approach will help make sure that they are. Simply attach all of the pertinent information to the main project — images, design briefs, all email correspondence between your team and the client, relevant team discussions — and your team can be assured that any information it might need can easily be found with just a few clicks.

This is the approach used by one of our clients, EVCL, which is an animation studio that uses WORKetc to manage its multi-city animation team, which has some members who work remotely. EVCL founder and project lead Adamu Waziri explains that it has proven particularly useful whenever team members need to find and use numerous assets to create a scene.

“For instance, somebody needs to do a scene,” he said. “For that, they’ll need a character rig; they’ll need a sound file which the voice actor has recorded, and then maybe reference pictures for the scene, etc. We can upload all of these to WORKetc. We have one guy in Kenya, actually, so if he needs something from the guys in Lagos, he can simply check if it’s already in WORKetc.”

Any updates to the project made past the kick-off meeting can also be easily appended to the information that’s already there. As an example, if a client emails you with a brand new list of approved colors for its logo redesign project, you can use the Gmail or Outlook add-ins to quickly attach that email to the right project. The design team working on the project can immediately be notified of the changes.

Making sure that project deadlines are clear is also key. Here, the Project module’s Gantt Chart view will prove useful. It gives your team a clear graphical view of the project schedule, letting it quickly show exactly when each deliverable is due and what steps are depending on stages or tasks due before them.

Communication Breakdown

OK, so now everybody knows their tasks, and they have easy access to all the information they need. Your team members can now go about doing their specific jobs, but without proper and effective communication between you, your team members, and your client, your project can still go down in flames.

You can mitigate misunderstandings by using WORKetc’s built-in Discussions tool. You can start and attach threaded, forum-style discussions from just about any item in WORKetc. If you need a reply from a specific team member, you can also attach a Reply Request. Once a thread no longer involves you, you can choose to hide it at your own discretion.

The Discussions tool also helps cut down on the amount of emails or instant messages you receive. Massive back-and-forth email chains clutter up your inbox and can be hard to track — a problem that English Garden Group was able to solve using WORKetc.

“Our biggest problem was inbound communication, keeping the right group of people up to date with what’s going on,” said English Garden Group Director, James Hartley. “The only way to keep track of things before was with cumbersome email chains, and when unsure, the only alternative was calling the office and asking everybody.”

“Now, inbound email comes into the platform and automatically slots into the projects, updating everybody who’s assigned to that project so we can compartmentalize. Nobody sends anything out of this company from a private email inbox anymore. It all goes out from WORKetc, so you can always find it, know who’s had what, at what stage each project, lead, or inquiry is at, who said what to whom and what interactions they’ve had.”

As for communication with your client, the Customer Portal will prove invaluable. By giving them access to your own custom portal, you can let your clients see email correspondence between themselves and your company, any tasks that have been assigned to them (for example, approving a new design or deliverable), their project’s activity stream, and even any relevant attachments. That way, your projects can have a high level of transparency and truly involve your customers every step of the way.

Sudden Changes of Scope

This common issue is closely tied to the “Misunderstood Requirements” section above, but it isn’t limited to the project team not understanding the full scope of a project. Sometimes, the client may want to add or remove target deliverables, or it may expect to get something that isn’t actually included within the project.

These changes can have a massive effect on your estimated completion time and allocated project budget. Thankfully, you can keep a close eye on both within WORKetc’s Projects module. First, WORKetc’s Timesheets and the Budget tab let you accurately track how much time and money you’ve spent on a project. This can help inform you on whether a change in scope can still net you a profit from the project.

For example, your logo design project has an allocated budget of $1,500 for five days of work. You’ve already sent your client the third of three revisions, but he requests one last revision. You check the Budget tab and see that you’re actually one day ahead of schedule and still well within the allocated budget. Since you’re still making money on the project, you can decide to accept the additional revision without charging extra — just a little added value for a client you want to work with again in the future.

If you don’t have that extra leeway in your project schedule, you can still easily change the current schedule by way of the Gantt Chart. Rescheduling a task is as easy as clicking and dragging it, and any future tasks that are dependent on the edited task will automatically be rescheduled as well. Just remember to properly bill for the extra work using WORKetc’s Invoice module.

Finally, you should also make sure that the client is properly briefed on the scope, duration, budget, and deliverables of each project. This is tightly intertwined with client communication, so again, the Customer Portal will prove invaluable for giving your clients an amazing overview of everything. You can add any and all needed project documentation to your WORKetc Knowledgebase as well, making it accessible to your client via the portal.

As I said before, you can also use the Customer Portal to keep your client updated regarding the project’s progress. This is the method used by Arkieva implementation partner Solventure, whose iterative approach to implementation means it has to communicate regularly with its clients.

Any issues with scope and the final invoice can also be mitigated by being as detailed as possible in your final invoice. The WORKetc Invoice module allows you to add detailed line items to your invoices. You can even include images — a very useful feature for product suppliers and design firms.