As the project manager, you have made all of the role assignments, and the proje

Question

As the project manager, you have made all of the role assignments, and the project schedule has been determined. One prominent stakeholder, Mr. Money, had asked for and was assigned a key role in the project—to secure donations for the project. The budget is being finalized, and the forecast for donations is 2 weeks overdue from Mr. Money. The project is falling behind on the project schedule. What is the best course of action for the project manager to manage this dilemma?

Locate a minimum of 2 articles that discuss strategies to avoid the pitfalls that cause a project to fall behind schedule.

Provide a summary of the suggestions provided in the article, and discuss the validity of the suggestions.

Post your solution to getting the project schedule back on track.

Explanation / Answer

In a project management activity, the most critical part is the schedule. They are the glue that hold a project together and keeps things running smoothly, but they’re also the part of a project manager’s organizational structure that always seems fall out of place when things aren’t going according to plan. But this can just aggravate the problem and make things far more difficult in the long run, and there a several ways to avoid falling behind schedule when those little things start to build up against you and your team

It’s the simple fact that, no matter how efficient and competent a project team are, things will threaten to derail even the best teams at some point. So what can you do to avoid this becoming a terminal issue?

Proactive Risk Assessment and eradication: An under-reported cause of project failure is risk management. In many cases, project risks are not proactively identified, analyzed, and mitigated. Even in cases where risk is an active part of the execution process, the rigor devoted to proactive risk management is negligible. Too often, problems are addressed reactively, causing schedules and budgets to be exceeded. This results in schedule slippage, budget overruns, and excessive staff overtime and burnout.

To avoid falling behind schedule, we can use an integrated and proactive risk management approach for all the project efforts. This includes developing and publishing the risk management plan. At a more granular level, we need to integrate the project risks we identified with the project's scope, schedule, and cost. Additionally, maintaining a risk log and making the data available to all via reports helps tremendously in maintaining the project schedule and reduces risks to hampering the schedule.

Scope: Additionally, what we can do to mitigate this risk is change the scope of the project so that the deadlines are met. According to the Iron triangle, the three factors cost, time and scope should be balanced such that none of the three goes out of balance. So in order to maintain the cost and schedule of the project, the scope needs to be defined and revamped whenever necessary. Even with best planning, it is not possible to identify in advance the scope to the last detail. But even if we somehow manage to get such a detailed breakout before we start, things can always change while the project is in progress. For instance, if it turns out that a particular task requires much more effort than what you have initially estimated, or if the task is not as vital as it was originally deemed to be, then we can exclude this task and the deliverables associated with it from the scope and still make it on time. However, before the rescheduling process, we need to get the approval from the client in place.

So these are the suggestions along with their detailed explanations that have been provided to get the project schedule back on track.

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