System outages and downtime are inevitable. They can cost you money, regulatory fines, customer loyalty and eventually undermine the reputation of the company. Major disruptions can even make it onto front-page news.

Take this example.

It was back in 2020. Over a 12-hour massive outage resulted in more than 23,000 failed 911 calls… There was a failure in part of T-Mobile’s network, which was made worse by routing and software errors. Even the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) got involved. Its report showed that T-Mobile USA “did not follow established network reliability best practices” that could have potentially prevented or mitigated the disruption. This failure cost the company $19.5 million!

Hopefully, the last incident you encountered didn’t cost you a fortune and was fixed without any significant impact on your business. But here is the thing: to thrive in an increasingly challenging world, businesses need to acknowledge that incident management is one of the most critical processes in an organization.

Regardless of size, shape, location, or industry, each company needs to have a consistent approach to incident management. To guide your organization towards healthier practices means detecting, tracking, analyzing, and reporting incidents in a timely and proactive manner.

Customers are more demanding and more vocal than ever. They expect services and applications to be available 24/7. To make matters worse, customers’ patience has become too limited (they want you to find a solution now!). In the midst of chaos, agility and speed become paramount to gaining a strategic advantage in the marketplace.

No matter the complexity level of your internal systems, you can improve the quality of the service you offer and reduce the harmful downtime if you invest time and effort in cultivating incident management best practices at your organization.

Let’s start with defining the terms.

What is an incident?

An incident is an unplanned event that threatens to interrupt or causes an interruption in a service by inhibiting the functionality of the service or reducing its quality. A few examples can be: a website going down, degrading network quality, running out of disk space, a feature in the application not working, and more.

Outages are likely to happen because of software and hardware failures or human errors; that’s why incidents can come from anywhere: an employee, a customer, the operations system…

If an incident is a major one, it requires an emergency response and usually becomes a core component of larger IT frameworks.

What is incident management?

Incident management is the process of detecting, examining, resolving, and analyzing service interruptions and outages. It aims to ensure service restoration – as quickly and efficiently as possible with minimal impact on the business. It’s the primary responsibility of DevOps, IT operations, and desk service teams to oversee the process of incident management. Depending on a company’s internal policies and procedures, incident management can also be viewed as a component of IT service management (ITSM).

Incident vs. problem

An incident is an unplanned disruption to a service or reduction in its quality, whereas a problem is the root cause of the incident. In other words, we talk about an incident when we want to explain what happened to a service. The moment we explore why an incident occured, we refer to the problem.

Incident management vs. incident response

Incident management is the broader concept or process of incident communication and resolution, while incident response deals with handling a single incident. This means that incident response is only one aspect of incident management.

5 steps of the incident management process

To understand what incident management best practices entail, it’s essential to have a clear roadmap of the steps involved in this process. Before we dive in, consider this: there is no one size fits all solution when choosing the incident management process for your company. This is one of the primary reasons you’ll see various approaches across different companies.

It’s high time to walk you through the stages of the incident management lifecycle:

Step 1: Detect

When an incident strikes, it should be detected and classified as quickly as possible. At this stage, you identify who should be involved in the resolution of the incident, which incidents require special handling, and which ones should be taken over by the regular staff. If you do a great job at detecting an incident, the following steps are easier to go through. Remember, the teams that start strong are more likely to finish strong.

Step 2: Record

After being detected, the incidents are logged and recorded. Who reports the incident, when it’s reported, what exactly isn’t working – these are, as a rule, mandatory fields to be filled in. All details are documented, despite the severity level of the incident. Afterward, you assign an ID number to the incident for tracking, processing, and reporting purposes.

A pro tip before we move on: keep all of the information in one place. This enables to speed up communication, prevent the opening of duplicate tickets, and steer clear of overloading the system.

Step 3: Respond

When the incident is detected, logged in, and classified, it’s time to respond to it.

If nothing major occurs, the incident is routinely handled by the technical support and DevOps teams. If not, you need to have straightforward internal communication for effective incident management.

You communicate with all impacted stakeholders and make sure they’re informed about the incident. If you aren’t quick enough on this, your customers will surely go a step ahead and flood the social media or the call center with their anger, resentment, and disappointment. “Arghh! It’s not working!”, “Damn, I can’t get my work done!” you’ll hear them saying.

During the responding stage, miscommunication can lead to bias and nervousness. Meetings to keep everything on track, timely notifications, announcements, and updates (usually handled by the communications team) are crucial.

Escalation is another essential phase in incident management. This is when a team member can’t resolve an incident and asks for more specialized help. Needless to say, the roles and responsibilities should be clearly identified; when an incident occurs, everyone should know who the go-to person is to ensure the right level of organization in your response.

Step 4: Resolve and close

With the previous steps performed and a satisfactory resolution found, it’s time to pass the incident back to the service desk. Only the service desk is entitled to close incidents. There is a simple reason for this: your team should check with the reporter and get confirmation that the resolution is satisfactory and can now be closed.

Step 5: Collect and analyze reports

Service improvement! That’s the buzzword we hear everywhere and every time.

So how do you improve your services? Right! You collect data on the reported incidents and do a thorough analysis to make sure the incident management process is complete.

Post-incident reports allow for a valuable retrospective review. But remember that these reports should be detailed, insightful, and pursue a major end goal: help the team prevent future incidents.

Incident management best practices or what makes an incident well-managed?

Although copying and pasting a templated approach from another business will hardly lead to stellar results, it’s always a smart idea to look into the best practices. Learning, refining, and adjusting – that’s how you take the incidence management process to the next level. Let’s see how companies respond when the message hits: “We have an incident!”

1. Detect before it occurs

You can, of course, go ahead and get yourself busy with putting out fires day after day, week after week…

But there is a better solution – to have a truly effective system in place for incident management. Through regular software updates, event monitoring, and incident response plans, you understand where the incident appeared, why it occurred, and how. Identifying and fixing root causes is your shortcut to preventing them from happening again.

2. Prioritize correctly

How many customers are affected? Is this a security issue? Do we have any data loss? To prioritize means to identify the various implications of an incident on various aspects of your business: finances, customer service, operations, security, etc.

Urgency, impact, and severity are the top criteria according to which you should prioritize the incidents. Doing this right is important to save precious time, resources and nerves. To streamline the process, you can set up a priority matrix and make sure all team members know how to use it.

Neat and logical categories should be outlined to ease the classification and prioritization of every incident. It’s recommended to use the option “Other” as little as possible. By the way, this step will also be helpful when it’s time for analyzing data and revealing patterns.

3. Distribute tasks smartly

The best incident response teams, especially in times of major incidents, act quickly, make decisions under pressure, and all of this – without risking the overall incident management process. One of the secrets of such success is that the skills of the team members are mapped and clearly defined to help assign roles correctly. Best practices hint that every team member has their own set of responsibilities, and the separation of tasks is well-informed. Load is distributed evenly and smartly.

If needed, have an in-house staff to handle incidents on a regular basis, and independent contractors who can step in to help you with expert advice. Make sure that all team members follow the same troubleshooting procedures to avoid miscommunication.

Incident management best practices also help to prevent employee burnout by advocating for a clear and specific handoff between teams. When internal communication is effective, teams can quickly replace each other if the incident requires a longer time to be resolved. This means the business doesn’t waste time coordinating and communicating with all parties involved.

The incident manager, service desk folks, ops team, system and network admins, communications team – everyone should be trained and prepared to respond to incidents promptly and with high efficiency.

4. Automate when possible

Repetitive tasks should be spotted and automated. Rely on automation to minimize human error and to take care of your team. Waking up people in the middle of the night or forcing them into working long, long hours can lead to… The consequences are well-known: burnout, decreased productivity, loss of motivation. Therefore, employee-centered businesses reduce the toll on people by integrating automation tools into the incident management process.

You should also consider having templated first communications ready when it comes to communications. Your first response to the detected incident should be quick and efficient so that you can focus on resolving the issue straight ahead.

By the way, after you’ve automated one aspect in your incident management process, ask yourself: “What else can be automated?” And automate the next bit of incident management.

5. Look beyond one-time incidents

An incident, especially a major one, can give a useful hint at what should be updated or refined on an organizational level. So, incidents are a great opportunity to channel some of the resentment towards preventative actions. It is, therefore, recommended to link incidents to ITIL and ITSM processes.

6. Report blamelessly

Efficiency is about teamwork and trust. In a workplace culture, where blaming one another is a norm, there’s little chance to handle incident management successfully.

High-performing teams focus on the process of incident management rather than the people involved. Report in a way that’s blameless. A culture of camaraderie and integrity should be a top priority. Help your team understand that you all walk towards the same destination and aim for a win-win approach.

Yes, incidents can be utterly frustrating, but the best teams take them as opportunities to build rapport within the team as well as with their customers.

7. Provide top-notch training

Today, there is one thing the IT and management fields have no shortage of – certification programs. Use them! Don’t wait till an employee reports about a skill gap. Identify those blind spots proactively and offer the best possible training in the field. The certification courses will help the team to deliver high-quality services, see the bigger picture, and align their day-to-day work to the organizational strategy.

Explore if you can refocus somebody’s expertise to benefit your business. Keep an eye on the latest tools and see if more sophisticated CI/CD tools (continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment tools) can be used in the incident management process and guide your employees towards relevant training programs.

Having the right personnel on board is a blessing. But to ensure your team members stay competent, you need to invest in them.

8. Look ahead

The IT industry will not stop evolving. Businesses are under pressure to make frequent and significant changes in their processes and procedures. Customers are not going to be any less demanding. A core piece of many businesses, incident management is going to be a continuous focus.

It’s important to constantly review what’s new in your field of operation and what the future holds for incident management. One thing is for certain – the smarter, safer, more secure and more reliable companies are going to win the competition. That’s why part of the incident management best practices is embracing new tech and leaning towards a more proactive and preventative approach to incident management.

For many of us, the commute to work used to take at least an hour, and we’d either be navigating traffic or train schedules to and fro. Nowadays, for many, the morning commute takes less than ten seconds, as it means walking from the bedroom into the home office.

And back in the day, people clung to their jobs like their life depended on it. More recently, however, employees resign and move onto greener pastures with alarming ease.

Data Tracking for Employees

Many of us, it’s true, still face a commute every morning on the way to work. But the trend of working remotely is increasing, no doubt about it. Over four million people work from home at least half the time, a 140% increase from 2005.

According to a 2021 study, more than half of employers will continue to offer a hybrid work model, allowing employees to work from home some of the time.

For a boss, this means it’s no longer an option to step up to an employee’s desk during the day to see how things are going. This naturally creates unease, and employers are resorting to alternate methods for monitoring staff.

More and more, with remote teams, managers and bosses are looking at tracking data in order to know how employees spend their time. Things like web cams, hourly tracking, and keyboard tracking tools all serve to assure employers that time is well spent.

Additionally, by looking at stats and data from interoffice communications, it’s possible for project managers to evaluate team dynamics, and monitor how remote teams engage and get along.

Administrative Jobs Decline

The shift to a remote work environment marks an even greater dependence on technology. More and more, we’re working in a paperless environment.

These changes eliminate a need for many low-skill office jobs. According to a study by McKinsey, office support jobs will have gone away almost entirely by 2030.

It’s not exactly a scenario of “the robots taking over,” but without any telephones to answer, break room coffee to make, or papers to file, certain office roles just aren’t needed anymore.

Recruitment Pool Increases

Now that most companies have remote work systems in place, the size of their recruitment pool has increased tremendously. Whereas formerly, companies were limited to only hiring someone local or willing to relocate, now they can potentially hire anyone with access to the internet.

In theory, this poses a real benefit to companies. It’s much easier to match skill sets to positions. Formerly, a company might have to forego its first choice if the recruit was unwilling to relocate. Not anymore.

It also saves the employer quite a bit of money on things like rental space and office equipment. It’s estimated that a company saves up to $11K a year for an employee who works remote only part of the time.

Employees Have the Upper Hand

Employees have gotten quite used to flexible working conditions, and they don’t want to let them go away. Apparently, making the work commute two times a day, five days a week isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper. Remote workers say they save up to $5,000 a year.

In a recent study, 40% of workers went so far as to say they’d even quit working for their current employer if he or she didn’t offer flexible working options.

This shift in priority particularly stems from younger Millennial and Generation Z employees, so it’s likely only to increase.

A Shift in Recruitment and Retention Strategies

Employees spoke pretty loudly in 2021. In August alone, 4.3 million quit their jobs. This comprises 3% of the total workforce.

A trend this dramatic leaves employers scrambling to find replacements. In an effort to both recruit and retain employees, they’ve had to offer better benefits, more flexibility, and better working conditions.

And off boarding, too, receives much more TLC than it has in the past. To the employee, it no longer means sailing off into the sunset, never to interact with the company again. Many companies have put policies in place that maintain a bond with former employees. The NFL offers them access to healthcare, as well as the use of its training facilities. Linkedin’s former employees receive premium membership for life.

By approaching a resignation with the intent to maintain a bond, the company only stands to gain. Some resignees turn into boomerang employees. And others are more likely to recommend the company to someone else.

Gig Economy Expands

According to Ida Liu, the Global Head of Private Banking at Citi Global Wealth, the number of people using gig work for their primary or secondary income has more than doubled in the past five years, comprising over a third of the total workforce.

Assuming this increase is driven by the workers themselves, then this is yet another signal that the labor force wants more flexibility. And it has huge implications for the onboarding processes in human resources departments and team building techniques for project managers.

Integrating temporary workers into the company culture, and fostering strong team dynamics is a totally different game when people have commitments to other companies at the same time.

Providing updates on progress is something every manager will need to do. It could be to appease the stakeholders or to make sure everything is staying on track. Whether you need to compile a report or present findings in a meeting, knowing the best measuring project performance techniques is a must-know for every project manager.

Projects can be derailed if they aren’t monitored correctly. Accurate measuring is essential for noticing early signs of issues that could disrupt the progress your team is making. Therefore, project managers must understand the accuracy of the data they have, the type of measurements they should use, and the record systems the company has in place.

This article will go over 7 key ways on how to measure project performance. Ensure the success of your business by using these methods to monitor and control the performance of your team and the progress of your projects.

Key Benefits of Project Performance Measurement

When you undertake a project, you make a commitment to deliver the goods on time and within budget. Unfortunately, the reality is that many projects fail at meeting these markers with leading causes coming down to poor estimations, limited budget, limited resources, poor forecasting, and bad communication.

Implementing strong project performance measurement methods gives you better insights into how things are progressing. By increasing visibility and forecasting, project managers can make adjustments to plans and ensure the swift delivery of their goods.

With the additional data that comes from measuring project performance, there is an increase in communication and teams will be able to predict when resources may run out. If any trends are forming, project managers will be able to monitor these and any negative behaviors can be addressed.

Project teams will also benefit from the additional data as it will improve their estimations for future bids. By collecting project performance data, project managers and their staff gain hard skills in forecasting and working efficiently. They can draw on previous experiences to help ensure the success of other projects they undertake.

Manual Experience

The first of the project performance measurement methods is all down to your own experience and opinion which can often be the first sign of something that doesn’t work. As this is a subjective measurement, you should try to back it up with objective facts before presenting your findings to the stakeholders.

Relying solely on your own opinion may cause conflict between the manager, team, and project owners. However, your own experience is valuable and likely a big part of the reason you have been hired for the job. To ignore what your gut is telling you would be foolish and if there is a legitimate cause for concern, it should be raised with the decision-makers.

When using your own experience to say something is or isn’t working, you need to approach the situation carefully. If egos start to come into play, your colleagues may try to claim you are biased. This is why it is a good idea to collect data that can back up your claims. It is particularly important if you are going to claim that the project is being inefficient or something isn’t going to work. However, ignoring your intuition and the project failing will be the worst outcome possible.

Start and Finish

The next method focuses solely on the starting and finishing point of the project. A key measurement is the current status at the start and how this compares to the end. Were the deliverables handed over on time, on budget, and on specification? You want each of these metrics to be a resounding yes, but that’s not always the reality.

The results can help to inform the next project undertaken and adjustments can be made based on historic results. Using this method for how to measure project progress is most useful for those with a shorter duration. Longer projects will benefit from additional measurement points to ensure that things are progressing smoothly.

If the project’s complete data is too hard to collect then you will be able to obtain a percentage at the start and the remainder when you have finished. These percentages should be determined before the start date and should be agreed upon with the product owner or contractor for the project. There are three common ways of splitting up the data points:

• 0/100 earned value method. This is most useful with experimental projects where gaining value can only occur once the tasks have been completed. There are no objective points during project progression to obtain data that can be used in reporting. Essentially, this will help to set standards for future, similar projects.
• 20/80 earned value method. This rule is used when you need to track tasks with a higher value that may take a longer time to reach the end. At the start of the project, you will earn 20% of your progress.
• 50/50 earned value method. This is the most commonly used method and it means you can mark 50% of the project as complete once it starts. The remaining 50% is earned once the project reaches completion.

Measured by Units

Tracking tasks by units is a great way to monitor those that need to be repeated throughout the project’s lifecycle. Repeating tasks should typically take the same amount of time which makes it easier to track progress. Cost and effort should also stay roughly the same even if repeatable tasks are done by different people.

Let’s use apples as an example, if you are preparing apples for display at your market stall, you may need to give them a shine to make them more appealing. If you have 100 apples that will take 20 seconds to shine, you’ll earn a percentage point for every apple completed.

This can be applied to almost anything within a project as long as it’s needed multiple times. If you have three cars in for tire changes, you’ll earn 33% for each car you complete. As a measuring tool, this method is easy to monitor, however, it is less useful for tasks that will only be completed one time.

Measured by Deliverables

To measure by deliverables you need to subtract the number of tasks accepted by the client from the total amount of tasks needed. Before the start date of your project, you should have defined the deliverables with the client. If you have signed on for multiple goods, you can earn percentage points for each accepted one.

For example, if you are a video editor and a client has contracted you for 10 videos over the space of a month, you may not have specified deadlines for each video. However, all deliverables will need to be returned in 28 days. Now you can earn 10 percentage points for each video you send back to the client.

Measuring by deliverables works well as a project performance progress method only when there is more than one needed. If you have signed on for a single deliverable, you will gain 100% of the points when it is delivered. When dealing with multiple deliverables, percentage points can be divided between each task. You can earn the points only when each task has been delivered to the client.

Measured by Hours

To measure by hours you need to estimate how long the project will take to complete. This can be based on previous experiences or decided with the client in advance. In order to accurately monitor percentage points, you divide the actual hours completed from the expected total hours.

For example, if you are a carpenter who has been commissioned for a chair from your catalog, you’ll have a good idea of how long this takes to complete. If each chair takes 10 hours from start to finish you will earn 10 percentage points for every hour you work on the chair.

Measuring by hours is great for projects that are similar in scope, especially if you’ve done like-for-like work in the past. Sometimes things don’t always go to plan so it’s worth building in a small buffer when specifying the delivery times with a client. It’s better to deliver something slightly early than risk being late.

Measured by Milestones

For bigger projects, you should consider measuring performance by milestones. If you’ve been contracted for multiple tasks then you can assign percentage weighting to each of the individual tasks that need to be done. It’s a great method when you’re dealing with projects that have more than one deliverable but are part of the same package.

Let’s say you work for a design house and a company has approached you for a complete rebrand of their online identity. Your tasks include a new logo, redesigned website, social media strategy, and promo material. Each task can be assigned 25 percentage points or they can be divided according to the amount of work required.

For example, 15% for the logo, 15% for promo material, 25% for the social media strategy, and 45% for a new website. This can be decided internally for your monitoring or decided with the client.

Milestones are a great way to identify different tasks and track the progress of each of them within a project. While one person works on the logo, someone else can be working on the website, and as soon as one part of the project is complete you’ll earn the percentage points assigned to that task.

Measured by Cost

Measuring by cost is another method for monitoring project performance that works best for something long-term. You will need to forecast the expected costs for the deliverables, which can be agreed upon with the client before the start date. As the project progresses you can take the cost spent and divide this from the forecasted total which will give you your percentage points.

For example, if you forecast the total cost as being $1000 then you will earn 1 percentage point for every $10 that’s spent. Measuring by cost makes it clear how much money is left in the budget to complete the task. It makes it easier to understand if a project is likely to come in over budget or not.

The cost method works well for project managers who can easily determine how much the deliverables will cost your company to produce. You can use your previous experience to help determine this or you may have to work within a budget set out by your boss, or the client.

How to Make Your Project A Success

To ensure the total success of your projects there are some key tactics for you to understand. Measuring performance is vital for communication, understanding, and team growth. However, you can also make sure your projects are successful by setting them up correctly and using these methods to deliver results.

1. Project Scope

Before you start anything make sure that you and your team understand the scope of the project, leaving nothing open to interpretation. If you know exactly what the client wants you’ll be able to deliver it and ensure they are happy with the results. Define the roles and responsibilities for each person in your team and what will determine project success

2. Plan out the tasks

Create a spreadsheet or use the project management platform Teamly to document each of the tasks that need to be completed along with who is taking ownership of it. List tasks based on their priority and double-check this with the client or your manager to make sure the most important things are being done first.

Sit down with your team to talk about the tasks and make sure they understand the priority levels for their jobs. Tasks in the critical path need to be completed in succession, one can’t start until the one before is finished. If tasks are split between staff, they need to understand what roadblocks could be encountered.

3. Keep everyone in the know

Communication stands tall as the most important thing a project needs to be a success. You need to keep stakeholders and your team in the loop with project progress. Should the project not meet the required milestones on time, let your team know and reprioritize to ensure the team can catch up. Meetings are key.

You could have a weekly meeting where everyone discusses what they did last week and what this week has in store for them. Alternatively, a 15-minute daily stand-up is a great way to stay in the loop without causing much disruption to people’s progress.

4. Escalate problems without delay

Sitting on a problem is a big mistake, they won’t just go away and the longer things are delayed the worst they get. It’s part of your responsibility to take ownership of issues and make sure they are raised with the right person. You should investigate an issue as soon as it’s found to determine how serious it is and if there is a root cause.

Chances are you will find a quick fix that can be implemented without further intervention. However, bigger issues that will impact the success of the project should be communicated with your manager or the product owner so that any significant decisions can be made.

5. End the project the right way

Once all the deliverables have been approved you can end the project before moving on to your next one. However, before you start something else you should evaluate the success criteria of the project and how well the team met these targets. This is essential for individual and team growth and helps to ensure the success of future projects.

New projects always uncover different inefficiencies that can provide a valuable learning experience. At the end of your project, you can take the time needed to digest what happened and why. Check with the product owner and your manager to see if they were happy with the project, they may have additional insights that can help you grow.

Project planning is the process of setting project goals and developing a plan for how to achieve them. It’s an ongoing activity that helps teams stay on track and reach their goals throughout the project’s life cycle, but it also necessitates organization skills, excellent time management, and good leadership qualities.

All projects must be managed and controlled to make sure they stay on course. In many cases, this involves making changes to the project’s business plan as more is learned about the risks involved and about how long a project might take from start to finish.

Whether you’re planning a home renovation or building a skyscraper, changes need to be made along the way, but you mustn’t stop planning. And you need to make sure that your plan is good and on target.

It’s no secret that poor project management can lead to disastrous consequences. But what are those consequences, exactly? And how can you avoid them? In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the consequences of poor project management and offer some tips for avoiding them.

What are the consequences of poor planning?

There are several consequences of poor project planning which, you’ve guessed it, can lead to disastrous consequences. Here are the 6 biggest ones:

1. Increased expenses
2. Delays
3. Quality issues
4. Client Relations breakdown
5. Lacking motivation in your team
6. Loss of trust by clients and employees

1. Increased expenses

Some consequences of poor project management are not as obvious or immediate as others, but they can be just as dangerous in the long run. One such consequence is increased expenses.

As your team works on your projects, you shouldn’t be surprised when costs increase gradually over time; that’s normal and to be expected. However, if there is a sudden and unexpected spike in costs, that could be an indication of poor planning.

Let’s say you are planning for the total cost of creating an online store. In your initial estimation, you might think that the job will cost about $15,000. But as the project progresses and you realize how much work must be done – or if unforeseen problems arise – it may become clear that you need to spend more money than originally expected to complete the project. Suddenly, you find yourself thousands or tens of thousands of dollars over budget and you’ll need to go back to your client for more money.

So how do you avoid a budget-busting increase in expenses? Well, a project manager who uses a proven methodology for budgeting is less likely to experience surprises when it comes to the final costs.

Therefore, project management must include dedicated study, monitoring, and forecasting. You must have all of the necessary information and data to create a realistic cost baseline.

You should also have the procedures in place to effectively track and report on any cost variances. A competent project management team would consider all possible methods for saving money and would never let a penny go to waste.

One way to get to an educated estimate is to take the time to compare the project to other similar projects on the front end. If you’ve done this sort of work before, look at your previous projects or use market research to get the best possible estimate.

Over time, you’ll begin to learn how long similar tasks typically take and you can account for this in your new project. This will give you an educated estimate based on previous experiences, which is always better than just guessing.

If you happen to be in the middle of a project and you see something unexpected, like a large cost increase, don’t ignore it; if you suspect something might be amiss, investigate to find out what’s going on and make the proper adjustments while communicating with the client.

2. Delays

Another danger of poor project management is the increased risk of delays. Your team may have underestimated how long a task will take to complete – or perhaps unforeseen issues kept popping up. This is unfortunately common; you might be surprised by how often projects get delayed.

The problem is, on some jobs, a delay can add up. If your team misses deadlines continuously, then the project may fall behind schedule and that will impact the final deadline. What’s more, this can snowball into expensive consequences down the road; if your project is running late, then you’ll likely have to pay your team overtime rates.

Delays also impact other factors in a project. For instance, if your staff misses deadlines for milestones, then they may miss them on the entire project. You could even experience delays due to missed milestones or because work wasn’t done properly the first time around.

If a project gets delayed, you’ll have to work extra hard to meet the new deadline. You may even have to bring in additional help or hire more staff if that’s an option. However, you cannot just push back the deadline repeatedly because that will put your client – and your project – at risk.

All of this could have been avoided with proper planning and monitoring.

How to avoid project delays? It’s important to stay on top of any delays and make sure that your timeline stays in place. One way to ensure this is by having a dedicated team member whose only responsibility is staying on top of deadlines. This person can offer updates at relevant times and serve as the liaison between your team and the client.

If you go back to our example of the online store, if the project manager had ways to track schedule progress, he or she might have seen a delay was imminent and could have taken steps to fix it. This is why management tools like Teamly are so important because they can offer real-time updates to keep you informed.

3. Quality issues

Another problem with poor project management is the risk that your final product will be of inferior quality. The reason for this is twofold: you might need to rush a task or do multiple things at once, and your staff may not have enough time to complete all of their tasks properly.

When rushing a task, it’s easy for mistakes to happen. You could end up overlooking important details or rushing through something that would have taken more time if it had been done properly the first time around. If your team members are working on multiple tasks at once, they might not have enough time to conduct proper quality assurance testing or carry out extensive research for each task.

If you set goals for your team to meet, you can help avoid this problem. This will ensure that your team members have ample time to complete their tasks and it creates an incentive for them to work harder.

Tools like Teamly can also be useful in this situation because it allows your team to collaborate more efficiently so that they don’t fall behind schedule or rush through tasks.

4. Client relations breakdown

If you fail to stay connected with your clients, it will be more difficult to get their buy-in. If you neglect the client’s wishes or try to force something on them that they aren’t comfortable with, you could damage your relationship with them.

If you’re not attentive, then your client may go to another company that can meet their needs. This will leave you in a tough situation because now it’s difficult to rebuild your relationship with the client or find another one. You also cannot give them any guarantees about what happens to the work you’ve already completed for them so this damages your reputation as well.

To avoid this outcome, you should set up regular meetings with your clients so that they can provide feedback and ask questions. By staying in constant communication, your team members can ensure that they do all they can to meet the client’s expectations.

5. Lacking motivation in your team

If your team loses motivation, then their productivity will suffer and the quality of their work might decrease. This can happen for a couple of reasons. One, the task is too simple and gets tedious; and two, because the project plan keeps changing, and their efforts feel like they aren’t making a difference.

If the project is too easy, your team members will most likely get bored because they aren’t challenged.

If the project keeps shifting then your team members may lose interest in the project altogether because it’s always changing. This can also happen if timelines are continually missed.

Avoid losing motivation by delegating project assignments that are on the more challenging side. Consider that to sustain motivation, you must combat boredom. You may also prevent your staff from losing motivation by laying down a solid framework ahead of time. Plans are always subject to change, but you can at the very least provide your team some sense of where they’re heading in terms of milestones and outcomes near the start.

6. Loss of trust by client and employees

If you let the client down by missing deadlines and providing low-quality work, they will lose faith in you and your services. This might cause them to turn to another firm, which means you could be losing out on a crucial source of income as well as future employment possibilities.

Your team members may also lose faith in you if you don’t respect your own deadlines. If you fail to hold yourself accountable for your work commitments, then they may not respect the deadlines either.

Avoid this by setting clear goals with timelines that are feasible. You can set up milestones along the way to keep you on track and help your team members see their progress more clearly. If you’re late on delivering something, update them immediately

Meeting expectations is your currency in trust-building. To the degree that expectations are missed, trust is eroded.

Make sure your team and clients trust you, keep your promises, and depend on useful conversations by doing things the right way. To build and preserve trust, stay true to your word.

What needs to happen for success…

So now that we’ve looked at the risks of improper project planning and what to avoid, let’s look at a few bullet points for achieving success…

• The project schedule needs to be realistic so stakeholders can rely on the schedules being met.
• Project deadlines need to be monitored and managed effectively with enough time for changes to be made if the project is not going as expected.
• Communication within the team and to other involved parties should always take place so everyone knows what’s happening and where they fit into the bigger picture of achieving project goals.
• Feedback from all involved (and affected) parties needs to be taken seriously and acted upon accordingly, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative.
• Any changes that need to be made must always include a detailed explanation of why the change is being made and what the benefits are, so everyone involved understands why you’re making certain decisions.
• Rejecting feedback won’t gain trust with your team or clients, so you must always be open to giving and receiving constructive criticism.
• Once your team has a clear idea of what success looks like they will be able to do their best work and maximize project productivity throughout the project.

Project management audits are a way for companies to better themselves and create stronger procedures for future projects. Not only does this benefit the company, but often the employees as well by creating more efficient systems.

There are few unavoidable aspects of running a business, and a project management audit is one of them. While the notion of an audit can cause anxiety when unprepared, the reality is that a well-planned audit leaves little to worry about. Being organized and proactive helps lower stress and create higher chances for positive outcomes.

What Is A Project Management Audit?

The role of an audit in project management is to ensure that company policies and procedures are being upheld. It also serves as a way to enhance those procedures by evaluating the assigned project being formally reviewed. Audits are usually performed by an external audit provider to avoid preferential treatment and to have the most effective and objective audit outcomes.

Audits are commonly used to provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of a company’s project management. They can be used in two ways. First, it can serve as a way to encourage growth in a company through gaining individually curated recommendations from an external source. Secondly, it can be used to help a company make the switch from one project management style to another, by highlighting the current barriers their projects are facing.

The Role of An Audit in Project Management

Project management audits can determine common struggles your project may be facing, and help prompt solutions to those struggles. If your company is experiencing recurring problems in your projects, an audit may be helpful in discovering and mitigating those problem areas so that you can optimize for the future.

Audits can provide important growth opportunities for a company. It can determine future procedures and processes to define company expectations, often with a goal to reduce costs, minimize project risks, and ensure high standards are met.

What Are The Main Goals Of A Project Management Audit?

The main goals of a project management audit can vary depending on the agreed-upon parameters. However, when determining the effectiveness of current project management procedures, there are five main objectives that are often included. Consider these:

1. Identify Risks
   An auditor will look for aspects that are negatively affecting the project. This may include anything that impacts the project timeline, budget, or quality. The auditor will measure the potential costs and time of the project as well as the resources necessary to ensure it has a high likelihood of success. This will determine if it’s possible for the company to achieve the project goals and find success based on the current strategies in place. Identifying these risks helps the project manager take steps to mitigate these concerns and achieve a more positive outcome.
2. Assess The Quality Of Services And/Or Products
   The auditor will take into consideration the different stages of the project. This includes reviewing the design concepts and the depth they go, considering alternative designs, and the current proposed implementation processes. By including these steps in an audit, it helps highlight any errors that the project may face and proposes solutions for them. This will provide a way to ensure that quality expectations are being met.
3. Improve Project Performance
   Audits identify the priorities of the project and determine if they are being supported. Project performance is improved through the attention spent on discovering and managing errors before they arise mid-project. This provides two main benefits: improving the proposed budget for the project and developing plans to avoid potential areas of struggle noted in the audit report.
4. Gauge The Quality Of The Project’s Management
   An audit will help ensure the project is complying with the company’s procedures and policies. This can provide additional protection to the project teams by providing clear outlines for management expectations. This can also provide suggestions for improvement for management staff to better support their teams and the projects they complete.
5. Learn For Future Project Management
   Audits serve as a learning opportunity for the project manager, allowing them to assess their current project and learn from their past performances. This helps shape and update a company’s policies and procedures to reflect their individual needs and goals. The learning opportunities project management audits provide are essential in the growth of a company.

Six Benefits Of Project Management Audits

When you complete a project management audit, you’re going through the process of discovering what you’re doing well, and what you may need to improve. By finding this information, your project can inherit a range of benefits beyond the project finding success. These benefits include:

1. Improved Project Performance
   When you are reviewing the project and breaking it down into each component, you can effectively see where some problems may exist. Once you have taken inventory of these problems, you’re much better suited to manage them.
2. Cost Awareness
   A project audit takes a deep look into the cost expectations of a project and is able to determine if there’s a possibility of that cost exceeding the budget. This reflects any problem areas, resource necessities, staffing needs, etc. When the project is broken down, these estimated costs can be more effectively assigned, allowing a more accurate estimate to be determined.
3. Reduced Cost
   The process of determining your cost estimate naturally provides a secondary benefit of reducing project cost all around. Once the project has been broken down into its essential elements, problem areas are discovered and can be mitigated. Managing these can reduce the cost of completing the project by eliminating redundancies or unnecessary inclusions.
4. Increased Clarity For Project Team Members
   A project audit helps team members become more aware of each aspect of the project. They will be better able to understand the complexities of the project and understand their role within it more clearly. As an added benefit, this can help develop a stronger responsibility to the project in each team member as they can visualize the importance of their role.
5. Better Relationship With Clients
   Clients will be pleased to know their project will be completed to the highest caliber, without money being wasted on avoidable pitfalls. An audit can give them peace of mind and allow them to feel more confident about their project.
6. Positive Effects On Future Projects
   Each time you perform a project audit, it will help the effectiveness of any future projects. Audits reveal aspects of change that can be carried forward into each project that follows. This helps all future projects to be completed with the same, updated standards in place without having to undergo an audit themselves.

How To Set Up A Project Audit Successfully

Successfully setting up a project audit requires five steps to be taken prior to the audit beginning. These steps will help ensure your company is ready to engage in the audit process in the most efficient and effective way.

1. Determine The Range Of The Audit
   Before you can begin the audit process, it is essential that the executive team determines if the audit is for one particular project, or for a range of projects across the company. This will depend on the outcomes you are hoping to achieve, and the reason why an audit is being performed.
2. Bring In An External Auditor
   Hiring an expert auditor that is not part of your company helps ensure the quality of your audit. Because these auditors are not associated with your company, their findings and recommendations are not influenced by their involvement with the company. This also provides your employees with a more open environment during their interview process, as they are protected by the audit being done outside the company itself. This allows for more honest feedback and maintains the integrity of the audit.
3. Identify The Challenges
   Before you begin the audit, identify the challenges you’re experiencing with the project(s) or the processes involved. Use this opportunity to reflect on what may not be working and how you’ve witnessed that through project performance in the past. This will help set the main goal for the project and provide a starting point for the audit.
4. Determine The Scope And Parameters For The Audit
   Think of this as a roadmap. This will help direct the range the auditor can engage in, and determine the areas that are most important. This will also help ensure that the auditor is investigating the required aspects of a project, and not moving into secondary projects or areas of the company that are not included in the audit.
5. Notify Your Project Team
   Let your team know about the upcoming audit. Many auditors will speak directly to members of the project team. Your team being prepared is an important aspect of the audit process. This will help the audit go smoothly and allow them to get the best information in an organized way.

An Internal Audit Checklist For Project Management

A project manager who has a well-planned audit can create a better learning opportunity for the team as a whole, and often performs better than those that are less organized. While there are many individual steps involved in an audit checklist, there are five main categories they fall under. By completing an internal audit checklist, you’ll be better able to support your team during the audit process. This will also provide you with a streamlined process for the auditor upon their arrival to make the process go quickly and smoothly.

The five areas that make up your audit checklist include:

1. Your Main Audit Goals
   Defining the main goals you have for your audit will help facilitate the initial planning for the audit. Your goals should reflect both your project and the company’s values. Goals could include reducing project costs, more efficient processes, or resource management improvements. Take some time with your team to discuss and clearly define the goals for this audit.
2. Well-Defined Parameters Of The Audit
   This includes the expectations you have for the audit process. It should include things like how the project will be measured and why it’s being audited. This will also include the areas that the auditor will focus on, such as team performance, resource allocation, or management involvement.
3. Members To Be Involved
   It is important to have a comprehensive list of the members that will be taking part in this audit. This will give you an opportunity to consider all those that play a vital role in the project, and notify those individuals of the audit. This list could include project managers, team members, sponsors and stakeholders, and even clients. Those on this list could be included for individual interviews throughout the time of the audit.
4. Audit Process And Expectations
   This portion of the checklist can be extensive based on the project itself and the audit goals. It is a list of the methods to be used during the audit. One essential and easily forgotten aspect to include is the environment and atmosphere of the project audit. When you include this in your checklist, you are ensuring your employees are protected throughout the entire audit process. This would extend to the communication expectations as well. Outline how the auditor is to communicate with the members from the previous section, such as individual interviews.Also include the expectation to prioritize problems based on their severity so that the report is organized in a way that makes implementing recommendations easier to navigate.In this section, it is essential to state that strengths be included in the reports as well as areas of improvement. Knowing what’s currently working and what isn’t is an important aspect of any good audit.
5. Audit Reporting Expectations
   Decide how the findings of the audit are to be reported and communicated and include details regarding the audit process. This section of the checklist could include:
   • Who will be included in the findings
   • Problems discovered during the audit
   • Solution recommendations
   • Performance evaluations
   • Project performance rates

These are all aspects that you should be including in your audit reporting expectations. This will help ensure you and your auditor have the same understanding of the audit process.

What Is The Audit Process?

The audit process consists of five main portions. What is included in each will vary based on the project, but the outline of the process typically remains the same. Audits can take up to a few weeks to complete, with the bulk of the time being spent gathering information. There are, however, some valuable aspects that must come first in this process.

The Audit Notification

This is a letter that is provided to the project manager to notify them of the audit. Within this letter are the audit highlights. It includes an introduction to the auditor(s) and lists the main objectives and scope.

Requisition Of Documents

After the project manager has received the audit notification, they will be provided with a list of documents the audit team is requesting. The documents that are requested will vary depending on the nature of the audit. For instance, this could include:

• Past project performance, both from the team as a whole, or the manager individually
• Average project costs
• Project breakdown and estimated cost
• A copy of the company policies and procedures
• Quality reports
• Project plans
• The companies project management framework

Kick-off Meeting

This meeting serves as the beginning of the audit process. It will provide time for the project team to meet with the auditor, and give managers an opportunity to ask questions to become more clear on audit parameters.

The Audit Process

This is the stage where the auditor begins gathering information through a variety of means, such as:

• Individual interviews and assessments
• Employee questionnaires
• Observations
• Evaluating provided documents
• Collecting evidence to support claims and recommendations
• Creating the final report

While the details of this list can vary, this portion of the process makes up most of the audit timeline.

Closing Meeting

The closing meeting is the time when all final information has been gathered by the auditor and recommendations are ready to be made. These recommendations would then be used to create an action plan to implement them.

Four Different Types Of Audits In Project Management

There are four main categories audits in project management fall into. Which one you encounter will vary depending on the company’s goal, and the reason an audit was prompted. The types of audits include:

1. Inspection Audit
   Inspection audits are performed after a product is built. It involves monitoring the creation process and inspecting it after it’s completed.
2. Quality Audit
   These audits aim to determine how well a project manager is following the company’s outlined processes. It deals primarily with the execution of a project and the implementation of company protocols.
3. Procurement Audit
   This audit directly relates to the use of resources throughout the lifetime of a project. It reviews the different contracts and contracting processes used to determine how efficiently resources are being managed.
4. Risk Audit
   The main goal of a risk audit is to increase the effectiveness of a company’s processes. It helps determine how well a company’s risk management processes function and helps measure the success of risk responses in place.