Companies have long been holding wrong conceptions about project management. While these false beliefs can lead your company to face losses in terms of time as well as economic resources, avoiding these can help raise your company’s work standard, save resources and time from going to waste, and thus, insure the progress of the company. This is why it is crucial for your employees to understand, analyze and eliminate these myths.

Below are listed the most popularly held myths related to project management avoiding which can help your company reach the next level.

 

Clients know what they need

Clients are the ones asking for your service; so, they must know what they are looking for, right?

Perhaps not!

Your company is the one expert in the niche, not them. Most of the times they don’t even have a dint of an idea related to what they are looking for. At Contentder, 70% of customers cannot specifically describe their expectations and just have a vague idea of what they think they want. Therefore, it becomes our responsibility to build a vivid image, no matter how blurred the clients’ ideas are. Sometimes, we also think it’s better to suggest what works out best for them.

 

Managers are good at everything

Since project managers are the backbone for any project, it is a common delusion that managers ought to be best at everything. They must be a good developer, good testing engineer, and a prolific designer. And on the top of all, along with a good educational background they should have the capability to solve any problem in a matter of minutes.

What makes a manager perspicacious is not the acuity at academic as well as other sectors, but it’s the experience and skillset they have related to understanding team member’s expertise and assigning the right work to the right member and, thus, making sure that the project runs along the intended direction and with targeted speed.

 

Reviewing lessons is a waste of time

Every project has some unintended mistakes and thus, gives the members some lessons to learn. This can contribute towards improving the existing project or even preventing such mistakes from occurring in the future ones.

Contrary to this, the popular belief that project members often hold is that lesson review or going over the same thing again is a waste of time. Rather, it’s such that reviewing lessons can save the company plenty of time that can go waste otherwise if such mistakes are repeated in the future.

 

Budget and time define the success

It is always believed that if a project is accomplished under a small budget and within an intended time period, it is a huge success. This is an outdated conception. Whether it be the Commercial-off-the-shelf projects or custom ones, quality plays a huge role. If a team finishes a product in an intended time and budget, but the end result has a lot of issues, the stakeholder might be unsatisfied with the product and the company has to put in an equal amount of resources to solve that. How is that beneficial in the long run?

 

Compromise means failure

As long as a project has a fixed destination, changing its scope doesn’t indicate that any problem is underlying nor it shows any sign of failure. Scope can be compromised because of various factors, such as the nature of the project, its complexity, and the like. Changing scope can sometimes even indicate the project’s upcoming success story.

 

Experts can’t be wrong

Experts might not excel at everything. For example, in software industries, it is often believed that the time limit of a project depends entirely upon the developers, which is baseless. Although a developer may be an expert in his/her field, he might not be able to accurately estimate the time and resources required to pack up a particular project; s/he might not have the exact idea of the time required for software testing and the like. Along with that, the time after the development period where the product goes under testing is hardly considered.

 

Starting must meet an end

Most industries nowadays are based on one size fits all commercial-off-the-shelf products. Although it has a lot of upsides, often times this makes it impossible to predict the failure of the product. Sometimes the product might have lesser public demand than expected, while other times, it might require higher resources input than the end result it would bring. If such, it is better for the company to discontinue the projects and utilize the existing resources on something beneficial.  

 

Same process will always work

Just because a methodology brought success to a former project, it doesn’t insure the same success with the latter. It depends upon various other factors, such as team size, project complexity, time restrain and stake-holder’s satisfaction. Moreover, with progress in time rises newer technology, which also makes a huge impact on the effectiveness of the process.

 

Continuous task reporting leads to success

Most companies often assume that in order to bring success, the employees must keep working constantly no matter what. They often want to get a hold of everything their workers do during their working hours. Because of these, it may seem right to make the continuous task reporting mandatory. Though at one end, it might alert the employees and improve their performance, on the other, it might eat up a lot of their time which might result in time deficiency in their routine, crucial tasks.