Bottlenecks In Project Management

Presented By:Kruti Gada (21)Nisha Gupta (29)Jinal Vasa (112)Manisha Mittal (50)Sharan Shetty (92)Jugal Desai (19)

Bottleneck in Project ManagementA bottleneck in project management is one process in a

chain of processes, such that its limited capacity reduces the capacity of the whole chain.

Bottlenecks are limiting constraints of a project. In any project there will be one or more bottlenecks that can prevent you from completing the project successfully. It might be getting the resource you need, it may be failing to complete a critical task on time

Types 1. Short-term bottlenecks – These are caused by temporary problems. A good example is when

key team members become ill or go on vacation. No one else is qualified to take over their projects, which causes a backlog in their work until they return.

2. Long-term bottlenecks – These occur all the time. An example would be when a company's month-end reporting process is delayed every month, because one person has to complete a series of time-consuming tasks – and he can't even start until he has the final month-end figures.

3 Major Bottlenecks

Human• You might have a team member who is slow to meet his deadlines, or another who is getting

assignments from different managers, and doesn’t know what to make priority. Or you may have a lack

of humans resources to get your project done.

• To avoid getting slowed down, make sure at the start of any project you have the appropriate number of

people assigned to the tasks involved. Make sure there’s a clear delineation of who’s reporting to whom,

and that there is no confusion about the priority of tasks assigned.

• In the Agile project management methodology, team members report for a daily stand-up meeting. This

takes just five to 10 minutes, and is a good way to make sure everyone is on track and has no

impediments to completing their assignments on schedule.

Budget• It seems like your initial planning allowed for all the costs involved in the project, yet, your team is

constantly asking for an increase in the budget due to unforeseen expenses.

Two scenarios might be at play here.

• One is that you didn’t properly plan the budget up front. Better research and a harder look at the

resources needed for a project can remedy this.

• The other is that your client keeps adding to his list of demands. Maybe he didn’t mention up front that

he wanted heated flooring throughout the building you’re working on, and naturally now he does.

Try to get all his requirements up front, or make sure your contract covers the process for change orders and

additional costs and approval processes.

Process• If your processes aren’t streamlined, you may have a bottleneck waiting for budget or actions to be

approved, which can slow down everyone’s work. Sometimes a team member has to wait for another to

finish one part of a project before he can begin his part. This can be a waste of time.

• Work to create processes that maximize everyone’s schedule. Find tasks that can be done while other

items are being worked on. Create automated processes that minimize approval time and get the

project rolling sooner.

• With careful planning and building in room in the budget for contingencies, cost overruns will not affect

the profitability of the project. The more bottlenecks you can avoid, the more smoothly your project will

run.

Practical Problems1. Your Client Gives You Vague, Ever-changing Requirements2. Your Client is Slow with Communication3. The Project Doesn’t Start On Time4. You Try to Manage Every Project the Same Way5. The Client Doesn’t Like What You Created6. Your Point of Contact Doesn’t Seem to Care About Your Project7. Too Much Time is Spent Solving Problems After Projects Are "Live"

Few challengesProject Management Challenges Within Corporate Projects

1. Undefined Goals

2. Scope Changes

Working With a Team: Challenges For Project Managers

3. Inadequate Skills for the Project:

4. Lack of Accountability

Another Project Management Challenge: Dealing With Risk

5. Improper Risk Management:

6. Ambiguous Contingency Plans

Project Management and Communication Challenges

7. Poor Communication

Managing Expectations: An Important Project Manager Attribute

8. Impossible Deadlines

9. Resource Deprivation

How to Identify Bottlenecks

Identifying bottlenecks in manufacturing is usually pretty easy. On an assembly line, you see when products pile up at a certain point. In business processes, however, they can be harder to find.

Here are some signs of bottlenecks:• Long wait times – For example, your work is delayed because you're

waiting for a product, a report, or more information. Or materials spend time waiting between steps of a business or manufacturing process.

• Backlogged work – There's too much work piled up at one end, and not enough at the other end.

• High stress levels.

Two tools are useful in helping you identify bottlenecks:

1. Flow Charts

2. The Five Whys Technique

Tips to avoid bottleneck

Goldratt in the Theory of Constraints, outlines a five-step process to manage Bottlenecks

1. Identify the process’ constraints

2. Decide how best to exploit the process constraints

3. Subordinate everything else to the above decisions

4. Evaluate the process constraint

5. Remove the constraint and re-evaluate the process

How to Unblock Bottlenecks

There are two basic options for unblocking your bottleneck:

1. Increase the efficiency of the bottleneck step.2. Decrease input to the bottleneck step.

In our trucking example, the clear solution was to increase efficiency by notifying the warehouse. How you might increase efficiency in other situations will depend greatly on the nature of the process concerned, but here are some general ideas:

• Ensure that whatever is being fed into the bottleneck is free of defects. By doing this, you ensure that you're not wasting the valuable bottleneck resource by using it to process material that will later be discarded.

• Remove activities from the bottleneck process that could be done by other people or machinery.

• Assign the most productive team members and technology to the bottleneck process.

• Add capacity in the bottleneck process.