7 Hurdles For Meeting Project Completion Deadlines And Ways To Overcome Them

Project Deadlines

In a Competitive industry, a product or service delivered late is equivalent to being undelivered. If you are looking forward to long-standing client relationships, your business needs to set clear completion dates and maintain strict adherence to those dates.

When the committed dates are a key factor in winning new projects, project managers can be tempted to set relatively improbable dates, counting on the ability to later iterate these dates or push the employees to deliver projects on-time. While it may work occasionally, this could potentially lead to employee burnout and/or customer dissatisfaction.

For meeting the deadlines, one needs to understand the hurdles to be overcome. Here we address the default hurdles or juxtapositions to be resolved by a customer manager.

Are you sure about Setting Realistic Work Targets?

Work Targets

Even when you are trying to win new projects, setting realistic work targets is significant. When pressed for time, we tend to over-estimate our capabilities and set unachievable targets. In his best-selling book ‘Thinking fast and thinking slow’ Nobel winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes that it’s the default nature of our brains to overestimate one’s own capabilities and over promise on completion dates.

Rather he advises thinking through the different potential issues and real challenges of a project undertaken, which could inadvertently pull back your project deadlines. Although your date may initially appear foolproof, you need to double check the project requirements and available talent. You can also draw on your experience of managing previous similar projects or experiences of other teams that you are aware of! All these measures allow you to set goals that reflect reality.

Multi-tasking or Focusing on a Single Project?

Focus on a Single Project

It’s an eternal question whether one should multi-task or focus on a single task at a time. When multi-tasking has its own advantage such as availing a particular talent at multiple projects, the maximum productivity seems to be achieved when an employee is allowed to focus on a single particular project at a time.

It also tends to attune the brain to the specific challenges of a specific project, allowing him to draw on specific challenges. In these cases, employee multi-tasking could be indispensable. In such situations, one can arrange the specific employee output to be focused on a limited number of tasks rather being spread among numerous projects.

Allowing flexibility Time for Project Iterations?

Time Management - CRM

A good project manager always sets a 15-20% leeway time for a new project. It’s simply unrealistic to expect no iteration or unexpected challenges to draw back on your finish dates. It’s usual that a new idea could only spur during the execution or undertaking a project, which could substantially improve your project.

Under these circumstances, the availability of extra time could potentially improve or divert the product quality to the desired levels.

Acquiring and Maintaining a Complete Project Outlook

Project Organization

Even with larger projects, there should be someone assigned to maintain a complete outlook about the designated project. When independent departments need output from different parts, one needs a project that derives the output from each part of the project. If this is not maintained, it could result in large wait-time or idling time, both of which could end-up as resource wastage. Also, there is a danger that different parts could become incompatible.

A Project manager always needs to maintain optimal workflow,co-coordinating dependent parts of the organization, when success seems unlikely.

Need for Evaluating and Managing Employee Productivity

Employee Productivity - KaptureCRM

Are you directly managing your employee productivity?

Do you allow or block social media on your Office systems?

Whether to permit 3rd party software to be installed on the systems?

All these small questions need the right answers to run an organization in the right way. As the answer to these questions depend on individual circumstances, having the right answers could make a large difference. Ideally, the employee and employer should always be able to follow a transparent productive report.

A work-place CRM solution could potentially let you integrate the various work-related functionalities into a single platform, allowing easy and direct evaluation.

As it may imply, the key component to on-time project completion is not having multiple hands or even adding workforce reinforcement. Rather, it involves conscious analysis and iteration along every step of project execution. Manage and align your project for precise completion with us, Kapture CRM.

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