Project execution is where the rubber meets the road. Some organizations even have a dedicated project execution manager for this critical part of the process.
For a project manager, the brunt of project execution is plan and schedule management. The project manager should spend the duration of the project tracking variances and adjusting the plan and schedule accordingly.
Here are the top 4 challenges to doing so:
1) Using the Right Measurements
Most project managers are well versed on what measurements to use for the projects (e.g. labor, cost, and schedule). The greater challenge is knowing the appropriate level of detail to enable effective measurement of progress.
The more detailed and more frequent the measurements are, the better able the project manager is to identify and communicate the potential gaps between the original expectations and the present reality. However, daily tracking is generally too granular to provide useful information on the larger picture of a project. One of the common challenges in this stage is the lack of time many Project Managers have when managing multiple projects and multiple stages of the project management execution phase.
So the key is finding just the right level of control that is responsive while being realistic and actionable.
2) Tracking the Critical Path
Tracking the critical path is central to project scheduling, yet not all organizations put a premium on it. Many project managers also have difficulty identifying and managing the critical path. When a PM does not recognize where slack is in a project, they either become inflexible with their schedule or they make changes to the tasks that have an outgrown impact on the project as a whole.
3) Resource Leveling
Over the course of a project, actual work will stray from initial expectations, people will take vacation, tasks will get delayed, and so forth. This creates an ongoing battle to ensure that plans are resource leveled.
For enterprise organizations, the interrelatedness of different projects—which share resources and deliverables—complicates things even further. A single project delay among any of the projects could have a significant ripple effect that requires the teamwork of multiple managers to resolve.
4) Communicating with Stakeholders
As we covered in the post on “Realizing the Project Benefits,” ongoing communication about project progress with stakeholders is critical. Project managers must communicate project milestones and budget performance in real time or else the project status is not credible, the opportunity to control the project through effective communicating is lost. Organizations that do not require this communication dilute the responsibility of the project manager by not know when and why projects have gone off track.
Unfortunately, not every organization has the core project management competencies in-house to adequately address all these challenges. Sometimes it takes adding leadership talent to fill the gaps, other times an organization needs to improve their project management operations at large, or some organizations even opt to outsource their PMO entirely.
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