1. The magnitude of project complexities has increased significantly over these recent years. This is mainly due to the increase in competitiveness among competitors. The ability to adapt to these changing requirements, with the development skills and efforts need to go side by side with the change in requirements as well. However, the skill to manage these changes is still scarce today.
2. Some of the uncontrollable changes are the environment or organizational changes which might impact the program itself. These changes need to be handled with greater flexibility. A good project manager need to adapt to the rapid changing metrics and organization goal, by successfully tracking the progress and outcome of the project without any hiccups.
3. The ability to communicate and liaise effectively with team members and stakeholders is the key challenges of a project manager. While developing and improving business analysis competencies, and integrating project management and business analysis roles/functions were tied as the second most pressing.
4. Managing Global projects and dealing with multiple people from different regions / countries with different culture, language, life-styles and time zone has been cited as a greater concern to commercial organizations than to government entities. Whether it is for commercial organizations or government entities and regardless it is a Global project or a regional project, the role of a project manager don’t change, which is to manage and drive for the end results.
5. Managing high risk projects has been cited as a pressing issue for some of the conventional leaders whom prefer to lead less risky and therefore less challenging projects but are more manageable. High risk projects constituted the types of projects which has no way to roll back due to the budget constraint, scarce of capacity, licensing constraint etc.
6. Non-centralized communication flow often led to misinterpretation of key messages which will eventually ending up with unnecessary issues and misunderstanding among the organization. This is one of the challenges which a project manager must try to avoid.
7. Increase complexities in today’s projects with much wider scope and increased dependencies which are beyond our control, co-exist within one single project. The more the variables, the harder it is for the project manager to manage these variables at the same time.
8. Ensuring that all researches, activities and coordination are carried out within the project are of the highest quality standard despite the change of the variables from time to time. So whether it is a sudden cut in the project budget, or a 20% reduction of head-counts support, the project timeline is still intact as per what have been committed at the envisioning stage of this project.
