5 project management challenges and solutions

Why do projects fail?

Your team is working overtime to keep up with ad hoc requests while your manager demands constant updates. Sound familiar? Your project management process may be flawed.

Inefficient processes drive burnout, reduced productivity, absenteeism, and staff turnover – all at a real cost to organisations. By contrast, highly engaged teams experience 78% less absenteeism and 51% less turnover, and are 23% more profitable.

How can teams manage information, communicate, and collaborate effectively to stay on track? This post covers five common project management pitfalls, why projects fail, and practical solutions to set your projects up for success.

In this guide:

• Challenge 1: You can’t keep up with all the ad hoc requests.
• Challenge 2: You can’t see what your team is working on.
• What is stakeholder management?
• Challenge 3: You have too many disconnected tools.
• Challenge 4: You can’t mix methodologies.
• Challenge 5: You don’t have a single platform for work.

Mid-project and last-minute requests come from everywhere – unexpected reports, updates, reviews, and emails. Some IT organisations report spending up to half their time on unplanned work. Our 2023 State of Work report reveals that workers face more than 13 interruptions per day. After each one, it can take 20 minutes or more to refocus on the task at hand.

Solution: Get a handle on ad hoc work

Effective work management means being ready for every type of work – planned and unplanned alike. Being prepared for the unexpected is essential, particularly given that even with solid project planning, work rarely goes exactly to plan.

Receiving ad hoc requests doesn’t mean you have to act on every one. Tracking ad hoc projects gives you visibility into your workload, lets you set clear boundaries, and helps standardise your request management process. Staying organised as new work arrives means focusing on a few key areas – such as your calendar and inbox.

Understand what stops people from getting work done. Download the 2023 State of Work report.

About three-quarters of American workers say they want a centralised place to view all their work across the organisation. More than half report that finding information as a consumer is easier than finding it at work.

Poor work visibility is one of the main drivers of unplanned work and overwork. Without knowing where your time is going – or where it needs to go – managing your priorities effectively becomes much harder. Without clear priorities, everything feels urgent, even when it isn’t. Effective time management, a core project management discipline, depends on having clear work visibility.

Low visibility also contributes significantly to inflexibility, making it harder to adapt quickly to project changes or respond to shifting conditions.

Beyond that, poor visibility makes it almost impossible to evaluate performance fairly. Managers need consistent insight into their team’s work to provide useful, transparent feedback and plan effectively for future projects.

With inboxes already overflowing, poor visibility only adds to the problem by generating unnecessary update requests and disrupting your communication management plan. Research shows that we waste over 8.7 hours per week on unnecessary tasks, low-value communications, and unproductive meetings.

Solution: Start seeing clearly

A centralised place for work management and a streamlined process give managers consistent access to the updates they need, without overloading their teams with status requests. Cutting unnecessary communication saves stakeholders time and energy – as does maintaining ongoing awareness of tasks, priorities, people, and progress.

Nearly half of workers say the sheer number of apps and programmes they need to do their jobs is holding back their productivity. And 39% say the volume of communication options available makes it harder to get work done.

But communication tools are just part of the problem. There’s also the overload of options for file sharing, networking, time tracking, work logging, and data management.

Solution: Know when to connect tools and when to cut them

The first step to organising and streamlining your tool set is to merge and connect wherever possible. Many platforms offer API capabilities for data transfer, and you can centralise your operational system of record (OSR), such as your customer relationship management tool (CRM), human resource management application (HRM), or enterprise resource planning platform (ERP).

Watch for redundancies and cut non-essential tools to minimise clutter. Don’t add apps simply because they’re new, budget-friendly, or trending. Be selective when choosing your main digital collaboration tool, and retire outdated tools along with their non-functional uses – such as relying on email as a scheduling tool.

Modern project management is no longer tied to a single methodology. Teams that once relied on the Waterfall method are now expected to manage projects using Agile – or a mix of both. Moving between methodologies, or finding an effective way to blend two or more, takes preparation and research. Without that groundwork, project success is at risk and your management approach will suffer.

Solution: Find the best mix for your organisation

Mixing methodologies isn’t about forcing one to be something it’s not, or demanding that any team follow a process that doesn’t work for them. Nearly half of project managers (44%) say Waterfall and Agile need to coexist. A leader’s role is to find tools that translate between the two, consolidate data, report on everyone’s progress, and bring teams into a different methodology.

You also need to understand the pros and cons of each methodology. When mixing methodologies, training, buy-in, and clear translation are essential.

Chaos has no place in your processes or workday. The stakes are too high and time too short to lose sight of progress and productivity. It’s time for a new direction and a fresh approach to work: enterprise work management.

Solution: Enterprise work management

Enterprise work management covers all types of work (planned and unplanned), methodologies (Agile and Waterfall), and users (technical and business). It’s a holistic, enterprise-wide system that manages the entire lifecycle of work.

Enterprise work management delivers visibility from the initial request through to delivery, covering tasks, issues, projects, and more. It’s a single place to manage work requests, track progress, manage resources, plan capacity, gather project data, and provide visibility that can be easily customised for any audience.