The Top 9 Challenges for Project Managers

Whether you are new to project management, or you’ve got years of experience under your belt, you all face a similar set of challenges as a Project Manager. ProWorkflow cares about making your professional life easier, by addressing the top 9 challenges for project managers, and offering potential solutions with our Nexus platform.

1) Scope Creep and Managing Project Margins

You can do your best setting a budget for a project based on all the available information you have before you start and still find that you are needing to spend more time and resources on that than you hoped for.  To address scope creep, you want to breakdown your potential project costs as much as possible and have as detailed a quote for clients as you can, to cover all potential costs. When you are doing repeat work, or work that is similar to past projects, having accurate reporting can help provide you with the best available information for future projects.

How ProWorkflow Nexus Addresses Scope Creep and Project Margin Needs

ProWorkflow Nexus offers you several tools that can help reduce scope creep. Our real-time data tracking and reporting offers the most current and accurate reporting on your project financials, time, and resource usage possible, meaning that you know exactly where your past projects have gone over scope, and where in the future you need to have a larger budget.

Our new interconnected Quoting module allows you to easily create Quotes based on part or all of a project, meaning that you can turn past projects into Quotes, and Quotes into projects, seamlessly and accurately translating data from potential budget to actual budget.

Our real-time reporting and forecasting tools ensure that you have an at-a-glance and always currently accurate view of the margins on your project. Do you need to cut hours on a future task to ensure you’re staying on track for your budget, and maximizing your profit margins? Our financial forecasting tools can help you figure out where and when that needs to happen.

2) Communication and Collaboration

In almost every instance of project management you’re going to have communication and collaboration needs. Even if you are a one person team, you’ll almost certainly need to have clear communication with your clients (this can impact the issue of scope creep as discussed above, as you must clearly communicate about project needs and agreed to quotes in order to avoid missing details that can later contribute to scope creep). If you’re not a one-person team, it’s important that you’re able to not just clearly communicate but also collaborate in a way that you know what the rest of your team is doing, so you ensure all work gets done and that no work is unnecessarily duplicated (more scope creep!).  

How ProWorkflow Nexus Addresses Communication and Collaboration Issues

ProWorkflow Nexus endeavors to ensure clear and accurate communication by offering you messaging tools at both a project and item/task level. This allows you to ensure that messages are sent specifically to who you want and clearly about what you want.

Additionally, for those of you with teams of more than one working on projects, we offer real-time collaboration tools that clearly show when people are looking at or working on an item or project, and also track what changes have been made by what user, allowing you to check in with each other about the work being done, and easily review the changes that have been made to the project, so that you are working collaboratively rather than conflictingly.

3) Clear Goals and Objectives

When working on multiple projects, or projects that take a long time, it can be easy for project managers to get lost in the weeds and lose sight of their goals and objectives for a project. It’s important to stay on task to help avoid scope creep, and to ensure maximum efficiency.

How ProWorkflow Nexus Addresses Clarity Issues with Goals and Objectives

ProWorkflow Nexus offers you a number of settings and options to visibly keep track of your goals and objectives at a glance. We have forecasting views that show how you’re tracking on your projected objectives. We also have a great deal of options for viewing the data set against your tasks and items that can be toggled on an off and saved as views for quick selection. This means that you can choose the data that is important to you to view, and have it visibly clear for you to refer to as you work on the project.

4) Resource Management

Many Project Management tools only include lists of things to do. But what if your project also involves resources, outgoing unit costs, incoming purchase needs? If you’re not tracking these on your project, your margins are not going to be reported accurately, and your budget is going to fall failure to scope creep.

How ProWorkflow Nexus Addresses Resource Management Needs

In ProWorkflow Nexus we not only allow you to set different types of tasks so that you can differentiate the type of work being done, but we also include functionality for charging both profit and cost against units. This means that you can include the budgeting for your materials and resources as well as your labor, ensuring that your quotes, budgets, and reporting are all encompassing all aspects of your project.

5) Managing Deadlines

Struggling to keep track of and manage deadlines can be one of the biggest pitfalls for any team. Whether you have a hard deadline for an event that is happening, a promised release date for investors, or a client project that will go over budget and affect your margins if you aren’t to deadline, it’s important to stay on top of deadlines throughout the project.

How ProWorkflow Nexus Helps You Manage Deadlines

ProWorkflow Nexus of course helps you keep track of the deadline for your project, but even better we let you break deadlines down at phase and item levels so you can keep track of smaller deadlines within your project and meet them along the way. Additionally, our forecasting tools help easily show you whether you are on track to meet your project deadlines or not, which can help you adjust the timing on the remaining aspects of your project.

6) Accountability

When working on a project with a team, it’s important to know who is accountable for what aspects of that project, both so that you know where responsibility lies while actively working on the project, and so that you can address any accountability issues that arose during the project when you are finished with the project.

How ProWorkflow Nexus Helps You Manage Accountability

ProWorkflow Nexus offers several different tools to help you manage accountability on your projects. Not only can you assign the people working on the project to the project, but you can also assign them to tasks and resources, indicating responsibility. You can easily see the work done on the project in real-time with our real-time time tracking and collaboration tools. And you can use our reporting tools to report on the work done by individual employees, or at Project levels, to have concrete data on who has been accountable for what.

7) Changing Client Needs

You’ve all been there – you get partway through a project and a client decides they need another aspect, more of something, less of something else, or something done to a different deadline. Now you have to adjust your project, adjust their quote, and make sure that your goals and deadlines are all up to date. How do you do this without losing track of one or more detail?

How ProWorkflow Nexus Addresses Changing Client Needs

Our new items system gives you the ability to easily make updates to a project and then apply those updates to an updated quote or vise versa. You only have to make the updates manually in one place, which means that as long as you remember to apply those updates to your quote, everything will match! Additionally, our forecasting and budgeting tools automatically apply any update you make, so you don’t need to adjust your goals and deadlines once you’ve input the new client data – Nexus takes care of that for you!

8) Team Management

For project managers working on teams bigger than one, you aren’t just managing projects you’re also managing people. You need to ensure that the right people are added to the right tasks, that all tasks are covered, and that no one is bogged down with too much work.

How ProWorkflow Nexus Helps with Team Management

ProWorkflow lets you easily see who is assigned to Projects, and more granularly who is assigned to what tasks/items underneath that project. Our real-time reporting tools allow you to keep track of both an individual’s workload and progress, so that you can ensure they are not assigned more work than they can keep up with.

9) Too Many Tools

Are you using a different tool for quoting, managing projects, tracking time, invoicing, messaging, file management, and collaborating? Using too many tools to manage a project can lead to missing details, errors in replicating data between tools, data in tools not updated on the same schedule, having to buy licenses for all team members on all tools for peak visibility, and overall confusion and chaos between the team members using them.

How ProWorkflow Nexus Simplifies Your Tool Needs

ProWorkflow Nexus does everything in house – quotes and invoices, project management, time tracking, messaging, collaboration tools, file management – it’s all covered in Nexus! There’s no need to duplicate data, buy licenses in multiple tools, or duplicate your work ensuring everything is updated, because when you make an update in Nexus all your work is updated. Of course, should you wish, we also offer a number of built-in integrations with outside tools like Xero and QuickBooks online, meaning that you can seamlessly send data out from ProWorkflow with significantly less opportunity for human error.

Solving Project Management Concerns is Our Goal

Whether you’re new to project management or an old hat, whether you’re managing only yourself or you’re a team of fifty+, whether you are working for in-house stakeholders or demanding external clients, the pitfalls and concerns of project management are something that you need to be on top of. We’ve built ProWorkflow Nexus with the top concerns of project managers in mind, in the hope that with just one all-in-the-box software we can alleviate all your project management software needs. Start your free trial today, or reach out to us to talk about how ProWorkflow Nexus can solve all of your project management concerns and needs.