Being a project manager is like being a goal tender in Hockey. No one really notices if you’re doing a good job but as soon as you make a mistake you end up with angry customers, employees and worse of all, an angry boss.
Goaltender Jacques Plante said that “How would you like it if at your job, every time you made the slightest mistake a little red light went on over your head and 18,000 people stood up and screamed at you?” That’s how it can feel as a project manager. One tiny mistake and you can have your whole company and clients demanding your head on a stake.
I’ve worked as a project manager and I’ve worked under project managers. Here are five pitfalls to avoid to become a great project manager and have clients returning again and again to your company.
Pitfall One: Underestimating.
Always Overestimate. No matter what type of projects you manage, your main job as a project manager is to be the liaison between your team members and another party, typically either a higher up at your company or a client. This means it’s your job to find out from individual team members how long their portion of the project would take and put together estimates. Always overestimate. Keep track of how long team members actually take compared to what they estimate and take that into consideration. Then, overestimate, within reason of course, to the client. When you come in below budget and a week early, you will have the client, and your boss, singing your praises.
Pitfall Two: Giving Clients Too Much.
Giving clients too much makes them too happy way too fast. Wait, I thought project management was all about making clients happy? It is, but if you make them happy as soon as they hire you, it probably means you offered them too much for too little. A client that you’ve never worked with has no way of being pleased with your services before you even begin. If you promise them a whole cake for the price of a cupcake, they’d be ecstatic. They’d talk about you to everyone they know. However, if you can’t deliver on time or on budget, happy clients will turn into nightmare ones. Even if you delivered them the most beautiful cake of all time, they still won’t be happy.
Pitfall Three: Offering Too Many Services
You’re a web design firm but your client wants you to write blogs for them. Someone on your team has done it before so sure, why not, take the extra money and provide the services, right? Wrong. If it’s not your specialty and you don’t have proven results, don’t compromise your business by offering or taking on additional services you aren’t experts at. You’re putting you main business at risk because even though you delivered an exceptional website, if the blogs you put up are terrible, they probably won’t be referring you to anyone in the near future. You don’t want comments about your business being “Well, they did our website and it was good but…the blogs they did for us were just terrible!”
Pitfall Four: Not Keeping Clients Informed
You gave an estimate, distributed the project to your team but then ran into a snag: it’s going to take an extra three hours to fix an issue on the project that you didn’t anticipate. You have three choices: eat the cost (and tell your boss), bill the client, or let the client know about the issue. As difficult as it is to call a client and let them know that you hit a roadblock, it’s what you need to do to keep a happy customer. They’ll like it more than discovering you billed them without talking to them and you’ll establish your own credibility because you discovered – and are willing to fix - a possibly disastrous issue.
The exception to this is if the issue was caused by your team. If so, you do need to absorb the cost but let the client know if the extra time will change anticipated deadlines. No, you don’t need to go into details about the error on your part or even admit your firm made an error. Just let them know the project is taking longer than anticipated but you’re comping them the 3 extra hours it will take. When you send the invoice, show those three hours as well as them being deducted. Everyone loves getting something for free.
Pitfall Five: Failing to Deliver
This is the biggie and it comes from the combination of all of the above. No matter what you’re doing, no matter how complicated and difficult, clients will not understand. They only know what you tell them.
If a space engineer tells you it will only take 1000 hours of his time to build a space rocket and the cost will be one million dollars in parts, you have no real way to actually know the time and cost of building that product. You don’t know how much engines, electronics or even fuel will cost. You take the engineers word for it and you assume that a space rocket costs one million in parts and takes 1000 hours to build.
Now, imagine this space engineer sends you a bill for two million dollars as well as 1500 hours of his time. You’d be upset that the space engineer overcharged you and failed to deliver on his promise.
However, what you don’t realize is that the 5 other space engineers that build that same rocket take 3000 hour and charge ten million dollars. Even if the space engineer tries to explain, you won’t care: all that matters is that he didn’t deliver on his promises.
As the project manager, you’re the space engineer. Clients typically don’t understand the complexities of what you’re doing for them. You need to help clients realize exactly what you will deliver and when you will deliver it by. Even if you give them the best product at a price well below your competitors, if it isn’t what you promised, you failed.
What are your tips for avoiding project management pitfalls? Comment below.
Elizabeth Becker, Marketing Manager of PROTECH.
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Image Credit: Coding Horror
