Manage Project Issues 

Disaster. Something has gone badly wrong on your project. A supplier has gone bust, or a developer is off sick, or a deliverable has been finished but is not at all fit for purpose. Whatever the problem, it’s your responsibility as the project manager to find a solution. Instead of sitting sobbing over your keyboard, where do you start? Here is our fool-proof 5 step approach for managing issues on your project.

1: Identify The Issue

When someone brings an issue to your attention, the first thing to do is take them seriously. Don’t dismiss the problem out of hand, however insignificant it seems to you. This is the point to log the problem in your issue tracking software, whether that’s a fully fledged project management software tool or a simple spreadsheet.

You’ll want to capture several details at this point such as:

• Name of person who raised the issue
• Short title for the issue
• A longer description of the issue
• Issue number for easy tracking
• Area of the project that it affects
• Date it was raised
• Issue category such as financial, operational, schedule etc.

At this point you may also have an idea about how big a problem it is and who is the most likely person to fix it, so you can note these down too. If you don’t know yet, don’t panic – that’s what the next steps are for.

2: Assess The Impact

Once your issue is logged, you can consider what sort of impact it will have on the project. Remember, an issue is something that has already happened (in contrast to a risk) so it is going to have an impact of some sort.

The person who raised the issue is probably best placed to advise you on the significance of the problem, but it could also be useful to organize a meeting to discuss the impact. Then make a note of the impact and significance in your risk log. You might, for example, categorize issues as High, Medium or Low, or score then on a 5-point scale. It doesn’t matter how you rank and assess them as long as you are consistent and it makes sense to you and your team.

3: Make An Action Plan

Now you know how big the problem is, it’s time to work out what to do about it. If you haven’t called the relevant people together for a meeting yet, do so now. In fact, most project managers will run Steps 2 and 3 in parallel and have one meeting where the team discusses the impact and then works out what actions to take next.

Brainstorm some potential solutions to your problem. If you need more input from other experts, get it. You don’t have to come up with the definitive answer during the first meeting, but if it is a critical problem it’s likely that you’ll want to spend lots of time working out what to do so that the rest of the project can move forward successfully.

Document the decisions made in this meeting along with who is going to be responsible for carrying out the actions and when they should be completed by. You can add this information to your issue log, or update anything that you already had in there. Finally, make sure that you record who is ultimately responsible for fixing the problem – the issue owner.

4: Complete Your Action Plan

Get to it! Issues won’t go away by themselves. Work through the actions that you have identified. Assuming that you aren’t responsible for all of them (try to delegate the actions to the person most suitable in the team), this part of the process will involve you chasing up the individuals who have taken ownership of the different tasks. In fact, it is easier if you ask the issue owner to do this and then all you have to do is follow up with him or her.

You will have identified dates for the critical tasks to be completed by, so check in with your team mates to ensure that they are on track to complete the work on time. One of the tasks may also be rescheduling activities in the project plan, so if there are any other knock-on implications of the issue, make sure that those are carried out too, like updating any other project documentation.

5: Review The Situation Again

Once all the actions are complete, you will have dealt with your issue. The very act of fixing the problem may have led to other concerns, so make sure that you review the situation again when the action plan is complete. You may find that you need to update your schedule, open another issue, make some changes or log a risk as a result of the tasks you have done to get the project back on track. That’s all fine – just go back to Step 1 and work through the whole process again.

Schedule time on your project plan to periodically go through your list of issues, review progress against the actions and check everything is as you would expect. You can also use these sessions (which could be a standard agenda item in a monthly status meeting) to ask team members if they are aware of any other issues that need to be logged and managed. You can then work together to keep on top of anything that is impacting your project.

No project is going to be trouble-free, so it is good to know what to do when the inevitable problems arise. Using this simple 5-step process will help you focus on assessing the problem, working out what to do about it and carrying out your action plan, which overall will help you keep your project on track for success.

( Courtesy Projectmanager.com)