3.

Lack of Effective engagement with stakeholders

Communication is key

Before aiming to engage and influence stakeholders, it’s crucial to seek to understand the people
you will be working with and relying on throughout the phases of the project lifecycle. Sharing
information with stakeholders is important, but it is equally important to first gather information
about your stakeholders.

Consult, Early and Often

A project, particularly in the early stages, may be unclear to its stakeholders for example, in
terms of purpose, scope, risks and approach.  Early, then regular consultation is essential to
ensure that requirements are agreed and a delivery solution is negotiated that is acceptable to the
majority of stakeholders.

Relationships are key

Developing relationships results in increased trust. And where there is trust, people work
together more easily and effectively. Investing effort in identifying and building stakeholder
relationships can increase confidence across the project environment, minimize uncertainty, and
speed problem solving and decision-making.

Compromise

The initial step is to establish the most acceptable baseline across a set of stakeholders' diverging
expectations and priorities. Assess the relative importance of all stakeholders to establish a
weighted hierarchy against the project requirements and agreed by the project Sponsor.
4. Lack of Skills and Proven approach to project management and risk
management

Team Selection
Once a project charter and project scope is defined and articulated, they will have to identify
project manager and project planners. Having project manager, project planner and team
members who are subject matter expert for a project in consideration wins half-battle. As project
manager & project planners define work-breakdown-structure and identify high level
deliverable, identifying right skillset to work on those deliverable is equally important. So based
on these identified skillset, project manager has to select resources who will be allocated to
project and will be assigned work.

Project Schedule
The planning phase of project requires well defined project charter and project scope. Based on
this project, manager can work on project schedule identifying important deliverable and
milestones. As he gets better understanding of project scope, available resources, he can create
detailed project schedule identifying minute level details of project schedule: i.e. tasks,
milestones, subtasks, allocating and assigning resources to each of these tasks. As the team
knows, detailing leads to questions, questions brings clarity, and clarity drives predictability.

Planning for Project Risks

Managing project risks is integral part of project management. If the projects are not trivial,
whether they like it or not -risk will be inevitable part of the projects. If it is not done as an
academic exercise of managing project risks, project risk management saves them greatly from
surprises. It is important for effective project management to plan for project risks right at the
beginning. The manager needs to make team members aware of project risks also provide a
platform like online risk register where team members and other stakeholders can quickly record
& highlight project risks.

Monitor and Control

As the project is kicked-off and project team has started working on project deliverable, as
project manager you need to track project progress, communicate it to senior project managers,
customers as appropriate. In order to monitor and control project