5 Work Management Tips to Avoid Project Delays

5 Tips for Managing Your Work Effectively to Avoid Project Delays

Let’s explore our 5 top tips for staying on track and avoid project delays.

1. Manage Realistic Expectations

It is essential that you use a reliable approach to make your future predictions. This is the most effective way to manage realistic expectations. Regardless of whether you’re forecasting the delivery date of a project with a fixed scope or you’re planning your next release, always remember that the future is not deterministic. There are always multiple possible outcomes that we could possibly end up with. There is no model that provides a single certain delivery prediction.

2. Keep Your Finger on the Pulse of Your Work (Not Your Workers)

Now that you’ve set realistic expectations and you have a solid understanding of the confidence level of meeting your goal, you should manage the flow of work to make sure you stay on track and avoid project delays.

A word of caution before we move on! You should focus on managing the work and not the workers. The approach of “stop starting and start finishing” is crucial to reducing delivery times and keeping your commitments. At the moment you find yourself assigning work to individuals or asking questions like “What is taking so long?”, you’re one step away from single-handedly disrupting the flow of work and compromising the efficiency of your system. Always remember that optimizing individuals’ performance contradicts the optimization of the workflow performance.

3. Manage the Flow of Work Effectively

To avoid project delays, you should embrace the fact that not everything may go as planned. Knowledge work is notorious for its unpredictable manner, unexpected and surprising things happen all the time. Regardless, you should still be able to manage the flow of work effectively to be able to meet your commitments.

Every work item that is close to the percentile that you used to define your SLA (as well as all the items that already crossed that line) are potential candidates for your further examination.

4. Increase Your Capacity

If the low-effort improvements have been attempted but unsuccessful, you may need to invest extra capital into eliminating the source of delay. This could involve spending on better equipment, involving more people or providing additional training, for example. You should look at increasing your capacity. To help you choose the right option for you, here are some strategies you may go for: 

• Get feedback from your team during your meetings and put forward their ideas.
• Reallocate people from different teams or give existing staff additional skills training.
• Look into purchasing new software, tools, and equipment.
• Always keep in mind that this is a long-term solution.

In fact, most managers jump on this step right away, even though it is much more time-consuming and expensive. But, it shouldn’t be your first point of call. 

After all, what usually happens when new people join a team is your performance will go down at the beginning. Your new team members need to be onboarded on the project’s ins and outs, the management practices and policies. So they will take up a significant amount of attention from the people tasked with the delayed work. 

5. Identify Opportunities for Improvement

At the end of the day, make sure you always evaluate what hindered your ability to deliver on time. Analyze your past performance data and identify the sources of delays – this could be unclear requirements, internal/external dependencies, expedite requests, defects, just to name a few. Carefully assess the reasons that prevented you from keeping your work on track and take appropriate actions immediately. 

Identifying opportunities for improvement and adjusting your management practices accordingly is the bedrock of business agility. The more problems you reveal, the more opportunities you will have to improve your delivery workflow and avoid project delays.

Setting realistic expectations is the first step towards project success. Once the work is started, you should manage it effectively to make sure you stay on track and deliver results in a predictable manner.