Challenges Faced in Project Management for IT, Construction and Government Sector

 

Challenges faced in IT SECTOR: 

1. Requirements Gathering:

Requirements gathering, or requirements elicitation, is the process of determining all the requirements of a project. There are two main types of project requirements, business and technical requirements.

The project manager’s challenges start from gathering requirements of the project/product. Usually in Indian scenario, the project manager rarely gets a chance to communicate with the end-users of the project. If that happens there will be fewer chances for ambiguity in the requirements. Hence, the customer should facilitate a meeting between the project manager and the end-user. 

 Once the functional specifications are ready, the designed discussions can take place. Once the project manager gets the requirements from the customer, it is desirable to get a sign-off from all the stakeholders, so as to make the subsequent stakeholder management easier. 

There are commercially available tools in the market for requirements management. Caliber RM is one such tool. Getting the timely sign-offs for the requirements documents from the stakeholders is the main challenge faced by the project manager today.

EXAMPLE :

North-West Management meets with its stakeholders, which includes a team of five vendors, two users and four members of its IT staff. Bob, the project manager, interviews the vendors and provides IT staff members with questionnaires to complete. He then conducts user observation with product users and asks for their feedback regarding their experience. From these interactions, Bob and the other members of his project team compile a list of requirements they gather from the interviews, questionnaires and feedback. After compiling this list, he facilitates a meeting with his stakeholders in order to remain transparent about the items his team included in the project scope.

2. Undocumented processes:

Challenges:

In many organizations there is often no or very poor documentation available about existing processes. In this situation, requirements gathering becomes a two-step process. Firstly, back-engineering of existing process, and then identifying areas for improvement and optimization.

Solution:

To ensure requirements are full and correct, it’s critical to identify key stakeholders and subject matter experts and engage with them directly. This helps eliminate any assumptions and provides a full picture. Drawing business process maps and visualizing workflows are effective techniques that can be used in this situation.

Example:

 Disengaged Employees

Even if your go-to person is loyal to the company and isn’t at risk of leaving, not having policies and procedures can cause problems with the rest of your staff. Employees tend to grow complacent and disinterested when they’re not empowered to learn new things and take on additional responsibilities. Leaving procedures undocumented sends the message that you don’t trust your employees with this responsibility, so there’s no need to document it.Conversely, documented procedures are easy for employees to review during their downtime, helping them prepare for enhanced duties within the company. 

3. Conflicting requirements:

Challenges:

Uncertainty about exiting process or different priorities for different stakeholders, often leads to conflicting requirements. If this is the case, the role of a business analyst is to document all requirements, identify contradictory requests and let stakeholders decide on priorities.

Solution:

As a business analyst you may have some recommendations about what should be prioritised, but it’s still important to hear stakeholders’ opinion. Setting up a poll can be one of the ways to get clarity about what is important to the majority of stakeholders.

Example:

It is very common that different stakeholders might be requesting requirements to be included that conflict with each other. This is simply a result of conflicting priorities between stakeholder groups and they may not realize they are requesting conflicting requirements. This is why the Business Analyst should identify these types of conflicts as soon as they arise.

An example of a conflicting requirement might be that the Human Resources stakeholder group explicitly requests to capture the age of an employee, but the Data Privacy team is saying that the age of the employee may not be captured or used in reporting.

4. Lack of access to end users:

Challenges:

Unavailability of end users may occur due to a few reasons and requires appropriate resolution. Sometimes end users are too busy with their day-to-day work and unwilling to participate in requirements gathering activities

Solution:

In such situations the best a business analyst can do is to minimise the number and length of engagements. Doing as much research as possible prior to the engagement will help to make the conversation more structured and insightful. It is almost like turning requirements gathering into requirements validation sessions. Defining focus groups and finding the most suitable end-users in each group will also help.

Example:

EUC 

A Firm Purchase Business software & its employees use it , In this case indivisual employees are end users. EUCs are prone to both risk and operational costs. From a risk perspective, there are dependencies on the users who create and/or maintain the EUC as well as potential version, data, and security control issues. From a cost perspective, there are often many inefficiencies with the manual effort required to extract, transform, and even enter data. These EUCs are also not designed to be resilient and highly available, which is a concern as many mission-critical processes and reports depend on EUCs.

Data on its own is also a serious concern. Financial institutions are used to data silos—where lines of business or systems of record contain specific silos of data that need to be integrated. When you look at the data estate created by EUCs, you move from a number of well-identified and managed silos to thousands of microsilos sitting on network shares, desktops, and devices without standard controls in place for access or availability.

5. Communication problems:

Challenges:

This category included language barriers, wrong assumptions, unclearly defined vocabulary, and excessive use of professional terminology that can lead to misunderstandings between stakeholders and a business analyst.

Solution:

The best strategy to avoid such situation is to communicate often and establish two-way communication. Document gathered requirements and send them for review and feedback to multiple subject matter experts, create and share a glossary of terms, and always verify assumptions.

Examples:

For many organizations, communication barriers have become more pronounced since their workforces shifted to remote work as a result of the covid pandemic. And with more than half of knowledge workers saying they want to continue working remotely post-pandemic, these barriers aren’t going away.

Challenges faced in CONSTRUCTION SECTOR:

1. Poorly Defined Goals:

It often happens in construction projects that stakeholders don’t really know what they want to get as the final work result. The lack of clear vision and well-formulated goals instills confusion. It leaves managers guessing and improvising without a proper sense of direction. 

Nevertheless, such an approach to project management may lead to excellent and creative outcomes merely in rare cass. It is most frequently associated with an elevated risk of errors, wasted effort and time, which is bound to have an adverse effect on overall project performance.

Solution: The best remedy to the problem of poorly defined goals is thorough planning. Keep in mind that the purpose of planning is not only to clarify the ultimate goal of your project. It is also meant to help you develop a detailed program of action and define some smaller performance objectives to attain on the way.

Example:

Sometimes stakeholders don’t know what exactly they want, other times they can’t agree. However, when the goals aren’t clear to a constructor it’s difficult to manage the project. Constructor can help prevent this by asking direct questions and continuing to communicate questions throughout the project. A lack of defined goals is one of the big challenges in construction project management, but they too can be managed.

2. Cost Overruns:

Many construction projects fail miserably when it comes to meeting their initial cost estimates. On a global scale, the average cost overruns in construction projects starts at 16.5%. In the meantime, individual projects may exceed their budgets by as much as 175% (like it was in the case of the Humber bridge in the UK). Overall, the larger a project is, the higher the risk of cost overrun it usually faces. Hence, complexity and project scale will certainly define your ability to satisfy original cost requirements.

But that’s not all. There are plenty of more factors at play. Some of them include:

1. Material price escalations, adverse weather conditions and other external risks;
2. Changes in scope, initial project designs and client demands;
3. Unrealistic estimates due to naivety, ignorance or deception;
4. Inadequate project management and performance errors.

Solution:  Since cost overruns may happen due to multiple reasons, there’s no unified solution to this issue. However, overruns can be reduced significantly thanks to proper planning combined with budgeting and expense tracking.

Example:

Changes During the Construction Phase

Contractors’ Financing

Payment Delay

Lack of Contractors’ Experience

Poor Cost Estimation

3. Schedule Overruns and Unrealistic Deadlines

This issue is just as common in construction project management as budget overruns and may stem from the same variety of reasons, including unforeseen problems and poor management. However, the main ones are deficient forecasting and the lack of preliminary analysis – they result in unrealistic expectations and unworkable deadlines. When a project’s time limits are too tight and are not in line with the actual scope of work, a manager is likely to face some other negative consequences besides schedule overruns. Unreasonable deadlines cause excess stress, employee burnout and low team morale. Hence, they impact productivity and quality of performance just as bad.

Solution: To deliver projects on schedule and develop realistic deadlines, you have to revise your overall time management strategy. You need to plan, prioritize and estimate your tasks thoroughly. You will also benefit from undertaking a thoughtful approach to scheduling and implementing effective time tracking tools because they help to control work progress and ensure compliance with initial project estimates.Consider actiTime. This time tracker collects data on the use of time in your team and provides evidence for more accurate time estimation. Thereby, actiTIME will enable you to set much more reasonable task deadlines and monitor team- and performance-related risks of schedule overruns in real time.

Example:

Construction schedule overruns are not uncommon on construction projects world over and the South African construction industry has not escaped the challenges of failing to deliver projects on time. Alkhathami defines schedule overruns as extra time required to finish a given construction project beyond its original planned duration,  

4. Inadequate Risk Management:

We’ve already mentioned that the failure to foresee and handle risks leads to budget and schedule overruns. However, risk management in construction projects is a challenge that deserves special mentioning because the hazards businesses face in this industry are much more diverse and costly than in many others:

1. Safety risks that may result in accidents and injuries,
2. Unknown site conditions,
3. Staff turnover and workforce shortages,
4. Escalations in material costs,
5. Economic crises,
6. Natural disasters and inclement weather,
7. Team coordination problems,
8. Issues with subcontractors and suppliers.

These are merely a few of the risks that construction managers must take into account prior to starting the actual work. Otherwise, they will suffer due to low quality of performance, constant delays and stakeholder conflicts, which decrease the chances for project success significantly

Solution: Since all projects are unique, the number and severity of factors that can threaten their completion vary to a large extent. To deal with the problem well, you need to adopt a methodological approach to risk management. Begin with identifying all the risks that are relevant to your case. Then, proceed to assess them based on probability and impact severity. Afterward, think of how to avoid the risks you identified and reduce their harmful effects on your project. Be sure to focus on the most probable risks first. However, remember that the eventual aim of risk management is to address each and every project risk you’re facing.

Example:  Project Risk: Project hazards such as poor management of resources, miscalculation of time, lack of proper policies, or misunderstanding of project deliverables. Such are the examples of Project Risk in Inadequate risk management.

5. Uncontrollable growth of the work scope:

 It may happen due to changes in original designs, stakeholder needs and the overall environment. In other words, scope creep is a result of inadequate risk management, insufficient planning and poor communication. And of course, it has many negative consequences, ranging from low customer satisfaction and minor project delays to massive financial losses and severe damages to business reputation. Therefore, it’s pivotal for every project manager in the construction industry to know how to deal with scope creep effectively and prevent it from happening.

Solution: Project planning and efficient control practices are your best remedies against scope creep. Define performance objectives clearly, set project scope boundaries, analyze risks and leave some room for possible changes in advance. More importantly, stay flexible but stick to your plan and learn to say “no” to unnecessary edits. Besides, adopt a change management strategy for the cases when scope creep is hard to avoid. With a pre-made change management plan, you won’t be caught off guard whenever you project plans get altered or when you have to adjust to inevitable shifts in the environment.

Example: The Denver International Airport is probably the biggest victim of scope creep in this blog post. It’s a prime example of poor communication between parties and of impossible timeframes and deadlines. The luggage handling system failed on a big scale principally due to four warnings from various associated parties all being ignored. Plus, key stakeholders, i.e. the airlines, weren’t involved in decisions. The set timeframes and deadlines were never going to be achieved. Out of these three real-world examples of scope creep, this one was easily the most expensive.

Challenges faced in GOVERNMENT SECTOR:

Government projects are not private or commercial projects that only need to satisfy internal standards; they must satisfy a whole plethora of requirements, as they are primarily funded by taxpayers and must be well worth the taxpayer’s investment. Transparency and openness with the entire process are also heavily mandated, and documentation must validate every step that was ever taken.The public sector is undoubtedly one of the supporting pillars of any functioning society. However, despite being a provider of services to better the general public’s lives, the public sector is not without its challenges. Difficulties with its reputation among young people, stops in communication, and reluctance towards change are rife in many western public sector organizations.

1. The archaic systems and modes of working in the public sector are turning away younger people:

 According to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries—consisting of 37 nations from North and South America to Europe and Asia-Pacific—the largest age bracket in the public services are likely to be between the ages of 40-49, with a significant proportion of employees between the ages of 50-54 and 55-59. In comparison to the private sector, the public sector’s ratio of younger employees is notably smaller.

This presents a significant section of the public services workforce ageing out into pension status and a lack of capable and willing supplementary employees. When our experts asked younger audiences about their reluctance to work in the public sector, their answers indicated a lack of brand awareness from the public sector. Potential young employees were eager to dedicate themselves to helping people but hesitant to join public service.

Solution: 

Digitalization of the workplace: Expert predictions foretell that millennials and Gen Z will represent a whopping 27% of the global workforce by 2025. These generations are tech natives. Our change management specialists at Devoteam strongly suggest that transforming the mode of working towards a digital-first system will motivate younger workers to turn their sights on working in public services. 

Example:

These and umpteen other examples reflect the gross mis-reporting of the countrys resource and income base, so much so that the countrys real national income level is anybodys guess.

Officials blame it on the archaic statistical systems on the one hand and the multiplicity of coordinating agencies on the other, and believe the existing systems need to be given a relook and the Department of Statistics should be vested with this role.

2. Outdated Systems:  Outdated systems often cause stops in communication and lower efficient collaboration. Currently, most government-run services operate on outdated legacy systems, and the topic of modernization isn’t a question of if but when. Modernization is the answer for better management of public services and smooth adaptation to the workforce’s potential shift. The current setup of legacy systems is rapidly becoming outdated, making integrations with modern systems and applications more expensive and less efficient. 

Solution:

Cloud migration: The Google Cloud Platform requires no setup or on-premise servers to run, much unlike legacy systems.  For organizations reluctant to fully migrate into a cloud-first environment, solutions like SAP on GCP provide seamless integration for legacy systems into the cloud. Our change management experts have seen the implementation of Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) propel collaboration and communication into elevated levels of efficiency and productivity. 

Example: Defense’s floppy disks The Defense Department has a 53-year-old system that is used as a backup to send and receive emergency action messages from nuclear forces, including nuclear bombers and tanker-support aircraft. It runs on a 1970s-era computer system and uses 8-inch floppy disks, which can hold only a fraction of the storage space of modern flash drives. The GAO said replacement parts are difficult to find “because they are now obsolete.” The Pentagon is planning to complete a replacement of the entire system by 2020. But Defense’s chief information officer Terry Halvorsen said that the floppy disks are not an urgent priority because the system is working fine: “The reliability factor on that system is where I need it to be…it is completely secure because it is a closed system.”

3. Reluctance toward change: Technology is simply a catalyst for change. Organizations can implement the latest technology and most innovative solutions, but efficient change is impossible if the workforce is not engaged or mentally working against the grain. People are naturally hardwired to resist change because of the ambiguity and risk associated with it.

Solution and examples:  Change management Our change management consultants at Devoteam Cloud Services understand that the people are at the heart of every organization and the key to a triumphant transformation. They know that people make the company run, and to ensure cohesive and successful operation, employees need to be on board and driven towards the same goals.