Project Management Challenges
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Project Management
Stakeholders are a group of people who have a specific interest in a project. It means that stakeholders can be of different types when handling a project (Hwang,2013). In most businesses, stakeholders can be such as investors, employees, managers, customers, creditors, and even business suppliers. The fact that stakeholders are different, their roles and expectations always vary. A good example is on the varied interests that each group has.
A good example is the owners of the business. For a business owner, any given Project that they consent, Allow them to achieve their primary objectives which are To improve their shares in a way that interest gets accumulated for them (Grudin, 2010). This means that for any given project to start, the business owners assess the benefits of the project in terms of share gain. Another excellent example of a specific interest of a group of stakeholders is the employees. For any given organization, it is the employees that generate revenue as they are the ones who work day and night to ensure that a company is profitable. In return, the employees expect their token of appreciation, which is usually in the form of a salary (Zdanytė, 2011). It means that when a project gets started, and the employees are involved, their primary point of interest is usually the consequence of those specific projects on their salaries. Employees assess whether the project will help bolster their productivity and in return, get higher wages. As a result, this goes to show that different stakeholders can have different expectations on a specific project, and the quicker their interests will be consolidated, the easier it is to run the project.
The management of the project goes well beyond the control of what is about to happen, to the management of the different expectations that the shareholders have. An example being the CEO of the company.this is usually the key decision maker in the company. The CEO is the one responsible for the approvals and the spendings on the project. The CEO always requires regular updates on the progress of the project. This includes all the steps undertaken and all the setbacks that the project is experiencing (Stark,2015).
On the other hand, the employees who are also vital in the success of the business, require constant training of the new systems this means that at most times, there should be a platform that enables the employees to gain access to the project so that they may be able to learn. This means that time has to be spared by the team handling the project to train these individuals on their roles with the new system (Scarlett,2013). Another critical stakeholder whose parts directly impact the project is the project manager who has to keep the project aligned with the goals of the company at all times (Rwelamila, 2012 ). This means that the project manager has to continually assess the business requirements of the company and Taylor the project towards it. This is hard as they want to keep on changing.
With all these sections managed by the project manager, it gets quite challenging for him or her as the responsibilities get increased. This, together with the difference in wants and opinions from the different stakeholders creates a massive challenge for the project manager and even may cause the slowing down of the project (Hoda & Murugesan,2016).
For the project manager to be able to assess the different challenges that are posed by the shareholders and mitigate them, they have to first identify the dependencies of each (Walker, 2015). As a result, the project manager has to check the relationships of each shareholder group to the other and come up with the common ground in which each can play in. A good example here is the CEO and the employees. With both of them handling different vital aspects, there ought to be some form of compromise with their wants and needs in regards to the success of the project (Suhonen, & Paasivaara, 2011). An example is that the CEO depends much on employees to work to achieve the required sales targets and thus make money for the whole firm. On the other hand, the employees rely on the CEO to come up with reasonable policies that are sustainable that can lead to the creation of a great working environment that will enable them to achieve their targets.
For a project manager to succeed in the implementation of a particular project, they ought to be able to deal with the many needs of the stakeholders. There are some ways that the project manager can effectively deal with this, and they include; the control of their emotions and the acceptance of authority (Taticchi,2010), which implies that the project manager has to be able to listen and understand any negative comments and know how to deal with them. In addition to that, the project manager must be able to interact well with all the stakeholders, get their different opinions and either uphold them or reject them in good faith to maintain the trust of the stakeholders at all times.
References
Hwang, B. (2013). Project management knowledge and skills for green construction: Overcoming challenges. International Journal of Project Management, 31(2), 272-284.
Hoda, R., & Murugesan, L. K. (2016). Multi-level agile project management challenges: A self-organizing team perspective. Journal of Systems and Software, 117, 245-257.
Zdanytė, K.,. (2011). THE THEORETICAL SUBSTATION OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES. Economics & Management, 16.
Stark, J. (2015). Product lifecycle management. In Product lifecycle management (Volume 1) (pp. 1-29). Springer, Cham.
Rwelamila, P. (2012). Project Management Trilogy Challenges in Africa—Where to From Here?. Project Management Journal, 43(4), 5-13.
Suhonen, M., & Paasivaara, L. (2011). Nurse managers’ challenges in project management. Journal of nursing management, 19(8), 1028-1036.
Walker, A. (2015). Project management in construction. John Wiley & Sons.
Taticchi, P. (Ed.). (2010). Business performance measurement and management: new contexts, themes and challenges. Springer Science & Business Media.
Scarlett, L. (2013). Collaborative adaptive management: challenges and opportunities. Ecology and Society, 18(3).
Grudin, J., (2010,). Wikis at work: success factors and challenges for sustainability of enterprise Wikis. In Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Wikis and open collaboration (p. 5). ACM.