If you work as a project manager, you will know the importance of meeting deadlines for your projects. Yet, despite your best efforts and that of your team, you may sometimes fail to meet the deadlines. If so, failing to meet deadlines should be avoided at all costs. It can, of course, happen due to various factors like unrealistic project goals, unclear expectations, or unclear time management. No matter what has happened, the issues need to be resolved. If you are wondering how to resolve the issues, the following are some of the simple tips for project management that will help your cause:

Understand the implications

On missing the project deadlines (milestones), first and foremost, you need to take a step back and understand the main reasons for missing the deadline. Once you have identified the exact reasons for the delay, you will have to work out solutions so that they are not repeated. 

Identify your options

Just because there has been a delay in a certain milestone delivery, in no way does it mean that everything is over. It would help if you explored the options to mitigate the impact and ensure that the project is complete in the shortest time after that. Once you have identified the reasons for the delay, you need to plug in the same. 

For this, you can use something called schedule compression techniques:

  1. Fast-tracking – With fast-tracking, you can overlap future activities (which were otherwise planned to be carried out sequentially) to ensure that the rest of the jobs are completed as quickly as possible in the shortest time. But this is subject to managing the risk caused by overlapping.
  2. Crashing – With crashing you reduce the duration of some of the future activities by allocating additional resources (people, machines, etc.) to those activities to ensure a reduction in their duration subject to an increase in the cost of the project due to additional resources. 

Create a well-crafted resolution plan

Once you have explored your options for mitigating the delay of the project delivery, you need to create a detailed resolution plan. For this, you can consider some of the following:

  • You need to explore the options regarding the costs and risks involved and then choose the best option suitable for your project.
  • Outline the exact steps required to carry out your plan of action.
  • Ensure all the mandatory approvals from the sponsor and/or other stakeholders have been obtained.

Communicate to all the stakeholders

Once your detailed resolution plan has been finalized, you need to communicate the same to all the stakeholders and assure them how quickly the delayed project will be completed based on your detailed resolution plan.

Learn from your mistakes and never repeat them

Once you have realized the mistakes which caused the delay, ensure that it never gets repeated.

Conclusion

To conclude, we hope that the tips for project management mentioned here will help you to take control of project delays. This is vital for your project management career success. It is also crucial you get PMP certified, which is why you need the best PMP exam prep course if you are not already certified.