Avoid Common Project Management Mistakes

Planning is one of the first parts of a project. It sets up everything else for success, when done well, or for failure when done poorly.

Building good plans can be challenging... there's a lot of moving parts and many people involved.  Here we'll learn what is needed to build good plans.

Schedules are an important part of planning - they tell when resources (people, money, equipment) is available and helps you ensure it's where it's needed when.

Understanding scope is crucial to running a project successfully, and a very common cause of pitfalls. Here, learn what scope is, and why it's so important.

Scope isn't created in a vacuum - you must involve stakeholders for a successful project.

Once it's been finalized scope should be closely monitored to ensure the project is adhering to it - and to monitor any possible changes to scope.

Every project has stakeholders - the people and groups impacted by, or interested in, your project. Understanding their importance, and managing them properly, is a success factor - and potential pitfall.

Most of a project is communicating with stakeholders - learn why, and how you can avoid the pitfall of failing to communicate appropriately.

Stakeholders rarely all agree all the time on how a project should progress. We'll learn where conflicts come from, and some things you can do to help manage, or avoid, conflict.

Risk, or unexpected things impacting your project, is everywhere. Understanding what risk is is your first step in avoiding the common pitfall of not managing it properly

Identifying risk with your team is time well spent, not only will you have thought through what could happen, you'll be well prepared for analysis and prioritization.

Analyzing risk helps you understand what potential impact and response there would be. This allows you to prioritize which risks should be addressed first.

There are many ways to respond to risk, including accepting, mitigating, transferring and avoiding. See how these strategies play out here.

Resources include people, equipment and money available to your project. Managing them properly is critical to success.

Balancing how resources are used, and ensuring they're used to the fullest, is a common success factor - and failing to do this properly is a common pitfall.

Project will typically be resource constrained - there simply isn't enough to do everything. Learning how to manage these constraints is an important skill.

Even with extensive planning, every project undergoes some kind of change. Managing change, and minimizing the risk is poses is crucial.

Just because someone thinks change is necessary doesn't mean it is. Having a proper process to evaluate change, and determine if it's needed, is important.

A common pitfall is not properly monitoring and controlling changes. Learn how to avoid this pitfall in this lecture.

Quality is how well something meets specifications, and ensuring high quality is a constant challenge within a project.

A common pitfall is thinking quality is inspection driven... in fact, it's an ongoing process.

An escaped defect - an error discovered after delivery - is a common project occurrence. How a project deals with this is called Quality Control, and something every project can improve.

KPI's help projects monitor their progress... all too commonly they're either ignored or under-developed, resulting in a common pitfall.

Lessons learned are a great source of ways to improve a project or a team, but frequently we neglect to collect learn. Learn about their importance here.

Lessons learned are a commonly missed opportunity to improve. Making time to review and analyze them is a success factor.

Don't fall into the pitfall of thinking lessons learned only help one project.. they can benefit entire organizations.