“I’ve never had a project delayed”, said no project manager ever. Why? Because that, right there, is mission impossible, and every project manager knows it.
Delays are your non–negotiables in project management. They will test your patience. They’ll test your leadership skills. They’ll push you to do extra work after the project’s over. All, so you can get to the bottom of the problem: What caused the project delay?
If you’ve ever asked this question, this article will help. It lists eight of the most common causes of project delays and how they occur. It also shares tips on how you can avoid them so you minimize their occurrence on future projects.
1. Poor Communication (Internal & External)
Poor communication has the potential to drive any project to one destination, and one destination only: failure.
If you fall short on your communication, you’ll not only cause confusion and frustration for your internal teams and external stakeholders, you’ll also set up the perfect environment for mistakes to be made and deadlines to be missed. And nobody wants that!
There are four key things that drive poor communication:
- Too little or too much communication
- Scattered information and multiple communication channels
- Miscommunication and mixed messaging
- A combination of poor communication skills and etiquette
How To Avoid & Solve Team Communication Problems
Most common communication problems in teams can be avoided in three ways:
- A collaboration tool – The easiest way to streamline and simplify your collaboration and information management is to have one platform. Use it to house and unify all communications for individuals, teams and external stakeholders or clients. Most of these tools also have real-time notification and daily update capabilities so everyone is kept up to date with changes.
- Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) – It may seem like a time-consuming job but having SOPs for all your key initiatives helps to avoid confusion. When you tell people exactly who can comment on what, how, and via which channels, you avoid mixed messaging and an influx of unnecessary feedback.
- Training & resources – When it comes to communication skills and etiquette, this might be a matter of additional training for your people. You can also check out one of our blog articles for helpful tips to improve departmental communications.
2. Poor Planning & Scheduling
If you don’t know what needs to be done, by whom, and when, chances are your project will be a downhill ride with an uphill cost spike. Without a clear outline and granular plan for your project, you risk hovering in one place and wasting time and resources.
Poor planning and scheduling is usually the result of:
- Unclear project objectives
- Poorly defined priorities and expectations
- Misalignment or misallocation of resources
- Unrealistic timelines
How To Avoid Poor Project Planning & Scheduling
To avoid poor project planning and scheduling, you can try a couple of things:
- Apply a prioritization technique – Plans usually go sour when the initial outline of priorities doesn’t match available resources and set timeframes. To prevent this, your first step would be to turn to a prioritization technique like the MoSCoW method, GTD method, or ABCDE method.
- Follow a scheduling method – To schedule and divide tasks amongst team members and assign deadlines, you need to know how long they would realistically take and which order they need to be completed in (for dependent tasks). To do this, you can check out our guide on how to set up a project schedule.
3. Inadequate Project Management Tools
Good enough is not great. And as a project manager you shouldn't settle for anything less than amazing when it comes to your project tool stack.
Three things can be tell-tale signs that you don’t have the right tools:
- Heavy lifting – You find yourself and your team spending too much time on manual processes like creating, recreating, updating, uploading, sending, and resending the same things over and over again.
- Too much switching – Jumping from one tool to another to manage all the moving parts, access information, track workflows, and issue invoices for one project.
- Misalignment & miscommunication – Missed messages and updates and uncommunicated schedule changes which all create full–blown chaos within your team.
ActiveCollab – All-in-One Solution For Project Management
With the right tool, you can simplify and streamline your entire project workflow from start to finish. What matters is getting your hands on the best possible tool for your team’s unique needs. And that means finding one software provider that solves the majority of your pain points and challenges.
Some of the challenges ActiveCollab solves for project managers includes:
- End–to–end project management – From initiation to invoice, the platform lets you create a project, assign and schedule tasks, communicate in the app, collect feedback or approvals, and invoice your clients.
- Budget and resource management – Track and distribute workloads, record time spent on tasks, send invoices directly from the tool, and manage your budgets.
- Reporting – Create and export custom reports on tasks, teams, or individuals to analyze completion rates and time spent on work.
4. Inaccurate Time Estimates & Unrealistic Deadlines
Time estimates and deadlines can influence one another. In ideal circumstances, you want your time estimates for all key deliverables to dictate the deadline. However, this isn’t always the case.
Inaccurate time estimates and unrealistic deadlines usually happen because of:
- Optimism bias – Underestimating how long a task takes to complete. This also includes assuming there will be no roadblocks or unforeseen circumstances that slow a project’s progression.
- Missing historical data – You either don’t have or don’t use historical data of similar projects to guide estimates.
How To Set Realistic Time Estimates & Deadlines
If you’ve never done a similar project or task before, you’ll have to take a wild guess. But if you have, you can make a guided one. To do that, revisit a similar project or task from the past. It may seem irrelevant, but checking back on past projects can help:
- Make realistic estimates – We tend to lose track of the time something took after it’s been done. When you track projects in project management tools, you can pull all sorts of reports and dashboard views that will show you in an instant how long a similar task took.
- Bring up potential delays - Another thing viewing past projects can do is remind you of potential delays you’ve experienced before, which may be possible with your current initiative. This can help you include time estimates with a buffer and, therefore minimize impact of delays.
If your project management tool has a timer or time-tracking feature, get your team to start tracking the time spent on tasks. This way, you can build a library of tasks and real-time estimates that can be referred back to for future projects.
5. Overlapping Project Priorities
If you’ve done your planning right, overlapping project priorities shouldn’t happen. At least not at the very beginning of a project. But if they do, they are usually the result of:
- Poor planning & scope creep – This could be because you didn’t include the right people, usually subject matter experts (SMEs), for direction in the planning process when priorities were originally set and agreed on.
- External factors – Anything from change in leadership and team capacity to industry or market changes and economic shifts.
How To Avoid or Manage Overlapping Project Priorities
Once a project plan has been signed off, it’s hard to avoid overlapping priorities. But, there are a couple of ways to manage them:
- Revisit team capacity & reassign – Check in with your team’s work capacity and reassign one of the priorities to another individual or team. This can be a tough delay to manage. Be aware you might come up against some resistance. Position it from the perspective that you need to take the pressure off one individual or team and distribute it across the board for this one instance.
- Invite external help – If you have the permission and budget, the other option is to bring on external help. It could be a member from a different department, contractor, or freelancer.
6. Scope Creep
We hate to say it, but this is another planning issue! If you set your priorities in the right order and all the stakeholders agreed, scope creep should not happen, full stop!
Scope creep can cause endless delays because of it:
- Throws off your timelines – Adding new priorities, particularly large tasks, throws a spanner in the works of your original plan, which needs to be reworked to align to the same deadline.
- Challenges focus & budgets – This is a big thing. When you start to add to new items, your team’s focus can sway. It can also cause conflict because of adverse impacts on the budget.
How To Prevent & Manage Scope Creep
Three things will help you prevent and manage scope creep:
- Onboard all SMEs & stakeholders – If you include all the SMEs and stakeholders on the project at the beginning, you should be able to avoid most scope creep incidents. Make sure all relevant stakeholders have the opportunity to speak up and provide feedback before the final project scope is signed off and approved.
- Signed off plan/schedule – However, if stakeholders do come back with new ideas, you can use the signed off plan and schedule to manage their additional expectations.
- Collect ideas – Sometimes, people just want their ideas and suggestions to be acknowledged and evaluated. One way you can manage additional scope ideas is to collect them on an official document and let people know they will be evaluated for future releases and updates.
We already covered what is and how to manage scope creep in separate post, so make sure to check it out!
7. Bottlenecks in Creative Feedback Loops
Feedback is important, but not every piece of feedback from every single individual carries the same weight. A good project manager knows this. They also know how to run and manage feedback loops so they don’t create bottlenecks that can drag out projects.
There are a couple of things that cause feedback bottlenecks:
- Inefficient systems – Not having an effective feedback management system that captures, shares, and updates information so everyone is clear on what is happening.
- Prioritizing and actioning – Having too many people being the decision makers of what feedback is worth actioning, when and how.
How To Prevent Bottlenecks in Creative Feedback Loops
To prevent bottlenecks in creative feedback loops, you could:
- Set feedback deadlines - Getting additional suggestions after you’ve already notified everyone and set the wheels in motion is frustrating. You can easily avoid this by setting a feedback deadline that applies to everyone.
- Implement rules for feedback collection - Create a set of rules around who can and can’t provide feedback and where. For example, you could use a virtual discussion space to collect ideas or instruct stakeholders to submit comments under a task via an online tool.
[include a discussion or task comments screenshot from AC image]
8. Scope Gaps Between Strategy & Execution Teams
Two words: poor communication (see cause #1 in this article). Scope gaps between strategy and execution teams mean the communication wires between these two groups got crossed or cut at some point.
Two things can cause this kind of scenario:
- Exclusion and silos – When these two teams don’t work in unison from start to finish, expectations from strategy may become misaligned with the execution team’s possibilities.
- Assumptions and lack of detail – The strategy team may assume something will be included because it seems logical. Other times, the issue pops up when you work by a plan that is not detailed enough.
How To Avoid Scope Gaps Between Strategy & Execution Teams
A few things can take care of scope gaps between strategy and execution teams:
- Clarity and confirmation – The project scope plan needs to be clearly defined. So make sure it includes all the granular details and not broad concepts.
- Stakeholder engagement – This one has been mentioned in some of the other delays, but it’s an issue that causes many delays. Make sure you engage all the right people at the right time. If you have to, run your stakeholder lists by a colleague or someone in the business who would be a good judge. This list can turn into a never-ending mess if you let it, but you do need to make sure the primary stakeholders are all included.
- Sign-off – If you can manage it, get the heads of relevant business, strategy and execution teams to sign off on your project scope plan. This can be used to manage expectations around unplanned and last-minute suggestions for the project.
Learning From Project Delays
Once you wrap up a project, we cannot stress enough how important it is to look back and analyze your process. Particularly if the project had several delays.
Post–Project Reviews
Sitting down with the entire team for a post-project review, for even an hour, will help prevent repeat mistakes and improve future project productivity and efficiency.
Before you set up this kind of meet, get everyone to come up with things they want to share and talk about. This will make sure you get the best use of your discussion time by dedicating it to analisis rather than brainstorming and quiet thinking time.
Analyze The Causes
Brainstorm and work through the issues you came across. Ask, what was the key cause for each delay? There could be a number of factors, from poor planning to resource constraints and unexpected roadblocks to mid-project changes.
When you identify the root cause for each item, you’ll have a better idea of how to prevent similar issues from repeating.
Document Lessons Learned
Create a report or database of all the project delays your team faced. To make it a user–friendly reference document, you could divide it into categories. These could include all or some of the topics discussed in this blog, like poor communication, poor planning, inadequate project management tools, and so on.
Next to each category, define the lesson learned and then come up with a list of prevention tips or action items. For example, if one of the key issues you uncovered was inadequate project management tools, your prevention tip and action item could be to look into new vendors that are a better fit for your business needs.
Share Insights With The Team & Adopt New Learnings
The final step, and the most important one, is to share your learnings and adapt future project processes.
Knowing what went wrong and understanding why, is only half the work of preventing project delays. You need to make and adopt changes.
Distribute and allocate each of the prevention tips or actionable items to various team members. Where possible, set deadlines for completion. If we take the example we just mentioned about finding a better project management software vendor, you might set a 3–month deadline and have multiple team members work on it, or send it off to your tech department to take care of with your team’s support and input.
How ActiveCollab Helps Prevent & Manage Project Delays
While some project delays can’t be avoided (sometimes you're just unlucky), a good number can be dodged.
Things like the right stakeholder engagement, meticulous planning and scheduling, and an unwavering strategic focus can prevent most potential delays. But you also need the right tools on your side.
ActiveCollab is a powerful productivity and collaboration workspace that helps project managers create, plan, interact, and manage projects from start to finish with minimal friction.
Creating a project schedule can be the most daunting part of a project manager's job. Because the entire project depends on its accuracy, it is also the part that carries the most risk when it comes to delays. ActiveCollab’s limitless project scheduling features remove complexity and make way for streamlined simplicity, which removes much of this associated risk.
With ActiveCollab’s virtual workspace, you can create project teams, invite internal and external members, assign and manage tasks (move, split, label, reassign, and drag and drop to another date), set task dependencies, and use Gantt charts for easy viewing of all the moving parts you are responsible for.
Instead of using multiple tools to communicate and manage your project, streamline your entire process. Remove the potential for errors and miscommunication by moving your entire project team or agency to one platform: A platform like ActiveCollab. Sign up for our 14–day free trial or book a demo for a guided tour!
