Biggest risk to a project is execution

Often, we think that a project’s success or failure depends on the project manager. It is the project manager who is solely responsible for project End-to End execution. And, this is obvious too. After all that’s what a project Manager is for.

Timelines and budgets are two most critical aspects for success of any project. Leakages due to miscommunication, rework cause delays resulting in increased costs and missed timelines more often than not. As per a recent study, 17% of all big-fat projects fails severely due to such reasons which makes it a threat to the continuation of the business.

Therefore, the question arises “why did this happen?” Ain’t there any mechanism to stop or have a control on such project failures?

First let us analyze the root cause of the issues that drags down the IT project to massive failures.

We conducted a survey amongst CXO’s of leading IT companies where most of them agreed that their project managers lacked experience in risk management. As per them if project managers are equipped enough to map risks then they will be better at predicting and manage unexpected events.

Here’s what is expected from a project manager to support a project and ensuring its seamless execution:

Is it so easy? No...

Let's see the process of risk management:

Risk Identification – Identification of risk factors that might negatively impact the project.

Risk Analysis – Once the risk factors are identified, it’s time to analyze the risk factors and degree of their impact.

Risk Evaluation – The risk is further evaluated by comparing the ratio of its likeliness of occurrence and its consequences to determine whether the company is capable to take that risk.

Risk Mitigation – Based on the risk evaluation Ratings, the processes are setup to control the damage causing factors by the prioritizing risks.

Risk Monitoring – Post risk mitigation plan implementation, it is imperative to monitor the overall plan and its functioning including the tracking of existing risk and occurrence of any new risk.

Prepare detailed story board - The first and essential task for a project manager is to understand the scope of work, client expectations and create user stories based on the project attributes. Each story then shall be further divided into tasks and each task should be cascaded legitimately.

Quantified effort estimation – Quantifying efforts in terms of Time and number of resources required to complete the project keeping in mind the unlikely events that might affect the timelines and budget of the project.

Retrospecting for better predictions – It is unlikely to repeat the mistakes that have occurred in the past. It is rather expected to learn and move on from your mistakes so that they are not repeated in the future. Smart project managers keep a track of historic unsuccessful attempts or work to ensure better future project management based on this information.

Resource Management - It has been observed that majority of the complex process go beyond their budget and sometimes overshoot the timeline due to poor resource estimation. Poor Resource management can be either under or over employment of resources, inappropriate allocation of resources, purchasing or hiring last minute resources leads the timeline and budget extensions resulting into project failure.

Often, companies think that providing professional trainings to project managers will fill-in these gaps and might resolve the issue. But these how likely do they think that certain skills can only come with years of experience and need expertise only. There are many companies in US these days of the likes of Amazon, Accenture, UPS and many more, who are hiring US military retired and other industries veterans. The reason why these companies are hiring such veterans is because of their discipline, experience in handling critical issues with ease and the kind of vast experience they bring in with themselves. In fact, alongside their rich professional background, these veterans are also bringing a rich cultural value with them.

It’s not just big companies who are taking advantage of experienced subject matter experts, there are online platforms like AIDOOS - an on-demand software development platform. AIDOOS capitalizes the expertise of the industry veterans as Subject Matter Experts to manage the projects to ensure its smooth and error free execution. AIDOOS is an AI based platform which distributes the Right task to the Right person, tracks the progress, integrate them and deliver the project to the stakeholders.

AIDOOS platform was initiated by its founder, Kris V., with a countenance to provide all types of IT Services and solutions at competitive prices with guaranteed Quality Output. This model is encouraging companies to free themselves from setting up big Infrastructures, hassled hiring processes, paying extra for unproductive hours and many more benefits.