Frustrations that Leave Project Managers Drained Out

As a project manager, you hold the responsibility for executing the overall strategy for fulfillment of your organization’s success, sketching the roadmap for all services/ products, maximizing business value, recognizing market trends, identifying opportunities, creating timelines, communicating your goals to developers/ testers, implementing development processes.......The list goes on and on.

Despite your best efforts, the pressures of getting to the market in fast track mode, ensuring quality improvements, meeting strict deadlines/ delivery schedules, balancing conflicting priorities, accelerating product delivery/innovation, and keeping your team aligned can exacerbate several common frustrations. So, as a project manager, what are your frustrations?

Here, we take a quick look at how engagements in the workplace and other project manager duties can frustrate you and lead to workplace burnout. Read on for more.

Regardless of all smartly integrated project management tools, it is very stressful to aggregate inputs from sales, services, marketing, support, customers, and/ or the executive leadership teams-- not to mention market trends and competitive analysis—into a more realistic product roadmap. A proper balance of the conflicting priorities prevalent in these groups is a must. Proper feedbacks as feature requests, the correct estimation of a project, meeting client expectations, and the efforts required for getting closer to the execution of your company’s strategic vision further enhance stress levels—and in many more ways than one.

Herein, it requires mention that even though all involved conceptually support your project goals and help you layout a fine roadmap to align with corporate strategy; lack of functional tools and co-operation from unprecedented quarters can hammer your carefully crafted roadmap with change requests. All this naturally leads you up the path of rough timelines, unanswered questions, complicated solutions, mid-way hurdles in the implementation of project processes, and sometimes, scenarios that demand immediate attention and responses—things that leave you all the more frustrated!

The changeover to a progressive and iterative development mindset often leads to products that customers really need-- at least theoretically—because you can develop, mock-up, test, and refine your featured products till you get them right. Quick movements through this cycle guarantee higher value creation and quick delivery of necessary features; in an accurate and convenient manner. However, this is seldom possible and leads to unwarranted problems and heightened levels of stress.

This is especially true in the case of teams that are friendlier with detailed road maps and well-defined product briefs. As a project manager, it becomes your task to articulate information about problems, those involved, causes behind the existence of these problems, and the correct ways of addressing them—in certain cases, all at the same time.

All project managers are hit up for correct and timely information. From signing off on the requirements of business stakeholders to finding solutions for the problems of developers/ team members/ others, taking care of customer-specific escalations and critical bugs, reassuring timely delivery, rationalizing decisions, communicating changes, repeating conversations, and taking hasty decisions even without full knowledge of the context—they have to do all this and more.

Though effective communication skills, quality management tools, correct process methodologies, and proper means of identifying issues come in handy in such scenarios, the heavy responsibilities accompanying the same often leave project managers completely sapped and exhausted. The elements of workplace burnout—especially for project handlers are indeed many. Budgets, plans, risk logs, notes, agendas, virtual teams, dependencies, operational tools, absenteeism...........

As professionals responsible for making others understand what their projects are building, managers need to evolve and find the right answers for their frustrations. They need to communicate their requirements and deliver all the right solutions—even while they keep on making project processes as much enjoyable as possible.