The celebrated author and GM of Yahoo Sports, Geoff Reiss, aptly said, "Project Managers are like jugglers shuffling with three balls — time, cost, and quality."
Precisely, project management is the backbone of any business organization, involving planning, executing, and closing projects to meet business goals and satisfy client objectives.
In this effort, successful companies rely on the essential pillars of project management that help them streamline processes, increase productivity, and deliver high-quality work.
However, nearly 85% of project managers monitor at least five projects parallelly. Such multi-tasking, stringent deadlines, and inefficient team management can waste 12% of your resources or lead to project failures.
Let's dive deeper into what challenges project managers face and how the pillars of project management can help you retain client loyalty.
What are the common challenges in project management?
Project managers believe that effective team management and maintaining high productivity is the biggest challenge that comes their way.
Almost 20% become overly stressed with repetitive tasks, excessive documentation, and budget overruns.
However, the most common challenges in project management include:
Scope Management and Client Expectations
Defining and monitoring the project scope is often daunting due to sudden scope creep, improper work evaluation and approval, and changing stakeholder expectations.
Since 40% of project teams only have 6-10 members, varying client requirements and sudden changes in project guidelines may lead to conflicts, delays, increased costs, and resource over-allocation.
Moreover, complex projects involve effective change management strategies and compliance with predetermined standards to maintain high-quality deliverables. In that case, a lack of knowledgeable professionals and continuous training may hinder productivity.
Resource Allocation and Budget Management
Nearly 54% of organizations fail to meet project requirements due to poor resource management. They strive to allocate the best-suited personnel to the right tasks, optimize their workload to prevent burnout, and schedule priorities to deliver project outcomes within resource constraints.
Furthermore, staying within the allocated budget is a constant concern for project managers. They often run into unforeseen expenses, scope changes, resource overruns, and inefficient tracking of real-time KPIs.
Risk Management and Quality Control
One of the crucial pillars of project management is proactively identifying potential risks, evaluating their impact, and developing strategies to mitigate them. Failing to forecast and manage risks efficiently can lead to project failures or significant setbacks.
Moreover, consistently maintaining high-quality work requires effective communication, team collaboration, robust quality control processes, and realistic timelines. In many cases, 20% of workers report unrealistic deadlines and hectic work schedules, leading to employee burnout and project failures.
How Can the Top 7 Pillars of Project Management Help You Achieve Project Success?
Successful project completion requires clarity, planning, communication, forecasting, and efficient budgeting.
Here's how the seven pillars of project management can help you achieve high business productivity and meet client expectations:
1. Scope Management
The first step in developing a project roadmap involves defining and controlling the project's scope. You should clearly identify project objectives, client goals, deliverables, timelines, resources, and limitations.
That ensures a focused project plan, defined employee job roles, the minimal likelihood of scope creep, and reduced last-minute alterations.
Furthermore, scope clarity and visualization enhance employee morale and maintain the deliverable quality that otherwise leads to project failures in 37% of cases.
2. Time Management
Creating and managing a project schedule, setting realistic deadlines, leaving room for iterations and revisions, and delivering the project within the expected timeframe define the pillars of project management.
That's why nearly 54% of the workforce use project automation tools to save more than five work hours and eliminate repetitive tasks from their daily routine. They can run projects on auto-pilot, automate workflows, define project milestones, track time, and deliver desired results profitably.
3. Cost Management
A successful project involves estimating costs, allocating resources efficiently, saving budgets for unforeseen expenditures, and monitoring expenses throughout the project's lifecycle.
That way, proper financial planning and resource management ensure project alignment with the predefined budget, reduce expenses by 28X, prevent financial overruns, and minimize resource misallocations.
4. Communication Management
Since most organizations prefer a hybrid project delivery approach, establishing clear communication with stakeholders, sharing timely and relevant information, and facilitating strong teamwork promote transparency and compliance with defined guidelines.
That's why almost 77% of high-performing teams use project management software like Cone to improve team communication by 52%, enhance the final product quality by 44%, and elevate customer satisfaction by 38%.
5. Stakeholder Management
Identifying and engaging with project stakeholders like clients, team members, sponsors, and end-users helps you understand their expectations, manage interests, and address challenges throughout the project.
In this effort, a purpose-built CRM can help deliver exceptional customer experience, enhance collaboration, develop visibility, and build stronger client relationships.
6. Risk Management
Detecting, assessing, and addressing potential risks can enhance the probability of your project's success.
In such cases, your risk management efforts may include evaluating risk impacts, developing mitigation plans, and monitoring project bottlenecks during progress.
That, in turn, will help you minimize disruptions, combat uncertainties, and empower your team to deal with unforeseen obstacles.
7. Quality Management
Meeting predefined quality standards and client expectations involves robust quality control processes, quality assessments, and deliverable improvements.
As rework is a time waste, you must reduce client dissatisfaction due to subpar quality and facilitate constant iteration of project outputs to deliver high-quality results.
In essence,
Successful project management requires well-defined project proposals, planned financial goals, clear stakeholder expectations, efficient resource allocation, and predicted risk management strategies.
While only 2.5% of companies can complete a project successfully, you can achieve the essential pillars of project management with configurable project management software.
Try Cone for free to integrate end-to-end project management workflows in one dashboard. Increase your team's productivity by 30% and deliver a premium client experience with cost efficiency. Read our blogs to know more!