The project manager role is challenging and tough. The project manager not only has to assign the tasks and manage the employee scheduling but also has to report the progress to the management. The project manager faces a lot of issues in a product development life cycle. I have tried to list them along with the solutions that I have tried at couple of instances.
Lack of Communication
Now more and more organizations have teams that are spread across the globe and are handling multiple projects simultaneously. Our team is based at three locations X, Y and Z. We were always on our toes to ensure that all the team members communicate with each other and also with the top management. One solution to this problem was very frequent conference calls among the interested parties which sometimes happened as frequents as twice or thrice a day, which is ok as long as it is not eating up your profits. For about year we did that also, but slowly and gradually employees were getting tired of explaining the same details to different teams. Along with the profitability, the productivity was also going down as a major chunk of time was spent discussing the issues. But the major issue was that though we were able to share the issues we were not able to track the issues. Then came the email era, we shared the issue with different groups in one email and our profits were also better because international calls were cut down considerably. Repetition to explain the issues also went down, employees were sending the details of the issue at their own convenience. Still we were not able to track the issues. It was quite a pain tracking who was doing what and what stage of the project the particular team was at? After lots of struggling and juggling with the issues, we realized the need of web based employee time management system. Now in TimeMerlin, our project groups are divided into projects and projects have users with their specified roles under them. With a simple timesheet/status report the status is updated into the system. Anybody can log into the sytsem and view the status. These are discussed in our daily “scrum” meetings. Issues can be tracked and project scheduling can also be handled.
Defining the Project Scope
Another major hurdle is defining the project scope. Even when the project scope has been defined initially, there are quite a chance of increase or decrease in the scope. Either ways it will lead to change in employee scheduling. To avoid invoicing blunders one solution is to wait till the start of next cycle of invoicing to make the changes or other way is to have a centralized employee scheduling module that can be shared by the project management group and accounting team.
Multi tasking
Project managers have to deal with situations where an employee is part of multiple projects. Though I am not who is very much in favor of a multi-project scenario because personally I think only jugglers are best at multi-tasking. Especially in the IT industry juggling becomes little risky because of the rate at which the scope is revised. It demands very frequent employee rescheduling, thus impacting multiple projects. What project managers in multiple project settings suffer from is that people do not know Tim is only 40% allocated to CNS and only 35% to YMCA analysis. (What is happening with rest 25% of his time?) In the meantime, Stephen is sucking up and is 60% assigned on Sony and 55% assigned on Sales. This happens every single month, and errors are caught only when invoices are going to be sent out. Thankfully, these were handled and caught at the right time by our project tracking module in TimeMerlin
Employee churn rate
Employee churn is another issue arises when the economy is very fast. People tend to hop from one job to another. Project managers should have team building activities or specials events lined up in their agenda to maintain adequate employee engagement. Apart, from that it is very important to have processes in place. The vaccum created by an employee should not lead to project lag.
Expenses
Expenses need to be managed. If an employee has submitted an expense sheet, the reimbursement should be disbursed as quickly as possible. Simply because the project manager is at a different geographical location cannot be an excuse for the accounts department to delay the disbursement.There can be a centralized expense management system to handle such situations.
Anlaysis and Reporting
Another most time consuming management overhead activity is preparing reports and analyzing them to put data in the presentations. Phew! How much I used to dread that! But now with TimeMerlin my life is much simpler. Most of the reports that I need to analyse and use in my presentations are ready made, I just need to run them and then export them into excel file. Life is so much easier! TimeMerlin’s project tracking module is very simple and easy to analyze. The TimeMerlin web application generates, analyses and produces the reports in the form of graphs and the pie charts that can be easily incorporated into the presentations.
TimeMerlin follows an integrated approach that aims to minimizing redundancy, reducing time wasting, avoiding inefficient communication and wrong expectations.
