With remote work being the new normal, managing a project in the current climate brings its own set of challenges. As a project manager, you either handle a remote team, or an in-house team, and there are critical areas of project management that you must look into.

Project management holds the key to effective resource utilization, improving business efficiency, and completing projects to satisfy clients to increase the customer base. In this article, we’ll showcase four specific pain points in project management and how to handle them.

1. Misunderstanding your workflow

Projects are doomed to fail if there is no clear-cut communication or an effective workflow in place. To have a clear understanding of your business workflow, you must analyze and identify your key contributors and assign specific roles and targets to them. Chop down the overall project planning into multiple smaller stages and give ownership to an individual or a team. By doing this, you can have a clear view of your operations and where you need to concentrate more to avoid short fallings. Processed gaps in the workflows are highlighted, and corrective measures can be taken immediately.

2. Faulty Estimations

If you don’t budget your projects properly, losing track of your cash flow is inevitable. Tracking the project budget during the preparation and progress stages is a key aspect of any project, so manage this accordingly. Once you have established a positive cash flow plan, make sure you arrange for hassle–free payment processing. Inaccurate estimates mean delays in deadlines and unimpressed clients. Rely on previous project planning data to produce accurate estimates.

3. Inefficient Resource Management

Utilizing the available resources to their fullest potential is only possible if you handle the labour allocation process smartly. For the best use of labour, carefully study your budget and the pool of resources you have at your disposal. Once you have a clear idea of what is in hand, decide which technicians should work on which tasks and for how long. Prioritize your work based on importance and deadlines and allocate resources accordingly. Likewise, make sure you assign the best available resource in terms of skill and experience for each task or project.

4. Poor Reporting Practices

Reporting is an integral part of a business, and for project management, it's more than essential. Poor reporting can easily mislead a project from the right track. Using a reporting tool can give you vital visibility into the project planning and critical business data. Reports are not just some random numbers of a completed project. They also hold your most valuable insights on the project to help you plan your future project more efficiently and improve process workflow. Frequent reporting of an ongoing project enables you to analyze and identify potential process gaps and errors before affecting the project workflow.

Wrapping It Up

Project managers are often overwhelmed with the responsibilities and workload. This can be stressful if they are not equipped with the right tools to handle the challenges. Fortunately, there are excellent project management tools to help you redefine your project planning capabilities. See if Archarina’s ArcProject could be the right fit for you.