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What are the Top Five Project Manager Challenges?

Posted by Deborah Bigelow Crawford

Deborah Bigelow Crawford has more than 20 years of experience in business management and handles the operational and administrative functions of PM Solutions. Ms. Bigelow Crawford also serves as Co-CEO of the PM College®, PM Solutions' training division, where she is responsible for the fiscal management and quality assurance of all training and professional development programs. Prior to joining PM Solutions, she served as the Executive Director of the Project Management Institute (PMI), and was instrumental in providing the foundation and infrastructure for the exponential growth that the Institute has maintained over the last 10 years. In addition, she served as the Executive Director of the PMI Educational Foundation. Over the last decade, she has authored numerous articles in PM Network, Chief Project Officer, and Optimize magazines. Ms. Bigelow Crawford is also co-author of the book Project Management Essentials. She has presented a variety of papers as a speaker at international symposia and conferences, and is a member of the National Association of Female Executives and the Project Management Institute.

If you guessed Resource Management is the number one overall challenge, you’d be right!  The remaining challenges, based on PM College 2015 Project Manager Sills Benchmark report are: unrealistic deadlines; dealing with scope changes, lack of clarity in scope; and unclear roles and responsibilities.

Now some of these challenges are more easily met than others.  Defining roles and responsibilities is one that surprised me.  That should definitely be an activity in the planning process.  I know PM Solutions has published a book, Roles and Responsibilities, which could be used as a guideline and customized to the organization. 

The Resource Management challenge, on the other hand, is not so easy.  Why?  I think our humanity plays into this answer.  We tend to overcommit and also under utilize our resources.  Also good tools to support this have been few and far between.  Managing the human factor, that is never cut and dry, is just not as predictable.   It was interesting to see in this benchmark report that certain industries, like finance (60%) and manufacturing (56%) rated resource management challenges particularly high; where industries like information organizations revealed scope changes (57%) as their biggest challenge.  Healthcare found lack of clarity in project scope (68%) led their list of challenges.

One way to overcome some of these challenges is to increase the project managers’ skills in these areas.  With the role of the project manager expanding as rapidly as it has over the past five years, this is to only to be expected. Some of the skills specifically noted needing improvement were those linked to increased role of leadership expected of a project manager.  Some of those skills needing the most improvement were managing benefits realization, planning strategically, championing and managing change and project stakeholders.  Interesting, though, is the percentage of improvement needed by project managers differed significantly depending on whether Leaders or PMs were asked.

If you are trying to understand where to focus your project manager improvement efforts to improve your project results, you might want to download a copy of the 2015 Project Manager Sills Benchmark.

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