Every business and organization is inevitably bound to run into hurdles that impede their progress or growth. As a certified project management professional (PMP), your job is to help your team and clients alike to recognize these issues and generate solutions to overcome them in productive ways.
Luckily, tackling issues is remarkably similar to project management itself. According to Yad Senapathy, founder and CEO of the Houston, Texas-based Project Management Training Institute (PMTI), this is because both fields require a process to be formed and a plan to be generated on how to reach a specific goal or objective. In this case, that goal is the overcoming of the issue at hand.
However, as Yad tells us, there are several steps PMPs must take before an issue can be properly solved.
1. Promptly report, log, and communicate the issue
“Once an issue is recognized,” Yad says, “it should be logged in a document that can be easily and quickly sent to your team, client, and other project stakeholders. Both keeping track of the issue and effectively communicating it to everyone involved in the project in a timely manner are absolutely essential. Otherwise, it will easily be forgotten or lost and left to fester into a problem that could flip your project on its head, leaving you and your team scrambling to recuperate.”
2. Assess the potential impact of the issue
“After communicating the recognized issue with your team and other stakeholders of the project, PMPs must assess the impact the issue can have on the project,” explains Yad. “If it is an issue that can be resolved relatively quickly or easily, you should never devote more time or resources than necessary to do so, as reallocating these aspects can have additional unforeseen impacts over the broader project scope and timeline. At the same time, if the issue is a larger one that will need more time and resources to solve, you don’t want to make the process of solving it more challenging or cumbersome than necessary.”
3. Assign actionable tasks to address the issue
“Each team member and stakeholder you work with has to be aware of the individual responsibilities they have in helping to solve the issue once it is recognized,” Yad adds. “By delegating specific actionable tasks to your team, your client, and other project stakeholders to begin addressing an issue that arises, each party involved will have their responsibilities clearly communicated to them. This will also help everyone involved in the project remain accountable to one another as you work with them to create a solution for the issue itself.”
To learn more about Yad or PMTI, visit 4pmti.com today.