Humans make errors. Being a Project Manager, you cannot afford to make errors. Even the tiniest mistake from your end might cost a huge amount of money to the organization, or worse yet, the entire project. Your colleagues might lose confidence in your capacity to get things done if your work goes wrong. That’s not a good way of career-changing.

Nevertheless, you can redeem yourself while managing projects from the risks of making serious errors. Below is the list of five common mistakes which project managers face and how they can be avoided

1. Forgetting the team

It’s imperative to recognize all the stakeholders while launching your project. Also, make certain that they are all convinced of your plans.

It involves everyone who invests energy and time into your project and is affected directly by that. If you ever fail to realize that every single team member is valuable, then you might end up undermining and even inflicting the complete downfall of your project.

Tip: Learn different ways to engage your stakeholders. The members of your team are stakeholders too.

2. Lack of communication

Do you wish to look at your project self-destruct systematically? You might have to stop talking at this point.

If you don’t, then set up elementary channels of communication and guidelines right at the onset of your project, you can just ignore the completion and results. Make sure that you do target reviews, team temperature checks, and regular status checks. This helps in keeping you and your team motivated and engaged at every phase of your project.

Tip: Prepare a communication strategy at the onset of your project.

3. Being a robot

Deadlines are indeed important, clients are important, and numbers are important. Yet if you care only about those, then you can have a battery pack instead of your heart.

Remember that you are not working with machines. You work with people who have feelings and who get stressed out. Realize that if you are acting like a talking walking spreadsheet, then people don’t care about your hardships either.

Tip: Business cases are indeed significant and deadlines matter. However, people are people. Understand how you can lead your team members so that you express respect, consideration, and empathy in your interactions.

4. Giving importance to budget over quality

A budget is important when you are certain that you have a target to hit the numbers. You can’t be blamed for gold-plating your outcomes when additional details aren’t required.

But, to be within the budget and complete the project, some project managers make the error of concentrating only on bringing deliverables.

During this cycle, all quality inspections are ignored. This results in the end product of poorer quality standards which is not acceptable to the client or yourself.

Tip: Make a plan for quality at the onset of your project. Make certain that you have communicated these to your team and are approved by the end-users. Check frequently whether you are on the path to accomplishing them so that there won’t be any surprises. Plan realistically.

5. Failing to realize the effort

Now it’s obvious that deliverables cannot be just pushed out, let’s understand something more significant. Meeting quality standards and deadlines takes energy and time.

Work always takes the time required to complete. It constantly feels like it puts up with a long time because you have no idea of what gets on into performing a proper job.

If you are not able to assure the required quantity and meet the deadlines because of high-quality requirements, then you have to make the client understand the situation. Don’t start scolding the members of your team because of the harassment you faced from the client.

This highlights that you don’t have any idea about the capabilities of your team members and you aren’t concerned about them.

Tip: Completion of a project takes a lot of effort. Get your team members involved in developing the estimates as it gives you a better understanding of what is entailed. Keep communicating with both the client and the team members so that you will know what you are capable of delivering. You don’t have to make any over-promises to the client.

These are some of the errors that you should be aware of when you begin with a project and also a few aspects that you have to do to prevent them.

Sometimes things might go wrong unexpectedly but don’t feel low. Utilize it as a valuable lesson and don’t make the same mistake again in the next project.