Costly Mistakes to Avoid as a Project Manager during Covid-19 Pandemic

The business world is passing through an unprecedented time since the outbreak of the COVID-19. Businesses are shut down except those providing essential services for the people. What does this mean to every project manager? It means the productivities of the companies under their cares more than ever, need to be prioritized by using any methods deem fit to accomplish the milestones and goals set. In this currently situation, each project manager will have to devise means of handling these tasks differently but must avoid some costly mistakes. Here are some of these mistakes every project manager must avoid at all cost.

Mistakes every project manager must avoid

• Ineffective management of Tasks list
Before the outbreak of this novel disease, project manager finds it easier to communicate the next milestones with team members in the hallways and at the weekly meetings. But with the currently reality on ground where every member of the team work remotely, many project manager fail to manage the tasks list well again.
There a couple of ways you can use to solve this new challenge, one of such ways is to add a visual timeline as it helps the team understand what’s next on the agenda. When done, it gives a clearer picture of what the milestones and its challenges are to all the team members, which will inform them to brace up.

• Failure to involve the management level
This is another tricky situation every project manager must avoid during this pandemic. Before project manager used to relay developments to his supervisor only when the going gets tough for him but this must be avoided now.
The supervisor isn’t aware of the developments as regards the project and it’s a must as a project manager to get him on board often now unlike before. You must always share your dashboard to him, let him see what’s going on before it gets out of hand during this lockdown. Report to him often and a big problem may be avoided on time before it gets out of hands.

• Failure to give each task a time estimate
To ensure effectiveness on the part of the team member, you must give each of their tasks a time estimate. There are a ton of members who would take on tasks and go ghost mode, this is one of the challenges a project manager faces when working remotely. You must tack their works through time estimate.
When you give out tasks, ensure you add time estimate to it so that the members communicate their progress in real-time. This helps you to know that you’re all working targeting the same milestones.

• Use of wrong tools
Another mistake to avoid is the use of wrong tools. When you make use of the right tools, everyone has the ability to access the data and view they prefer. This consequently empowers each of the members in the team to work little or no supervision. The use of right tools makes the data collected reliable to work with. This will create an excellent circle of improvement on the part of a project manager.

Obviously, during this pandemic, pockets of project managers will be facing a ton of challenges to ensure continuous productivities while working remotely. However, these challenges aren’t insurmountable. When the project manager is ready to face reality of the present situation and ready to learn, costly mistakes will be ultimately avoided with no hassles.

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