Remote Project Management: Pitfalls and Solutions
Remote Project management is not exactly a new concept. Even before the pandemic, the idea of running projects with its members geographically distributed has been widespread. While the current crisis has brought work from home to every doorstep, the project management teams need not walk into the practice, completely blind. Based on our consultation experiences, we present challenges faced by project managers while managing projects remotely and their solutions.
It is essential to understand that the typical project challenges of issues and deadlines will continue to exist, and we will not be including these issues in the scope of this article. While the nature of the problems varies with project types, we will be discussing the common challenges that are faced by most of the project leaders.
The Pitfalls
I. Lack of Skills
According to the Pulse of the Professionals (2017), 20% of projects fail because of the lack of project management skills. However, when it comes to remote project management, several other factors come into play and may contribute to project failure.
Very often, availability takes precedence over skills in remote project management. Availability issues can arise due to the geographical distribution of employees or due to personal working style. The task might get assigned to a person available rather than the person capable of doing the job.
Remote project management also involves making use of several project management tools. Limited knowledge of such tools can also result in issues during project execution.
Solution:
Allocation of the correct person, or taking steps to build the skill set of the project team are the only two ways out of this situation. It is a good practice to conduct training for the project management tools before actually deploying any tool.