The Hidden Cost of Popular Project Management Strategies

Many MSPs embrace popular project management strategies that seem good enough. These methods can carry an unseen price. Here are some of the ways your informal PM approach can steal from your bottom line. 

When your “project managers” come to a task from a non-project-related role, learning and embracing the best practices, tools, and daily habits of project management can feel overwhelming... especially when projects are not your core business.  

To keep the work rolling, many accidental project managers adopt strategies that seem good enough to get the job done. They might use a shared spreadsheet, manually add tasks to calendars, and – when there’s time – visualize long-term project progress in a Gantt chart.  

These strategies might seem adequate. And they don’t require your already busy team to learn new processes or tools. But if you drill into the ways these ad hoc solutions impact your time, client relationships, team, and revenues, it often becomes clear that they are taking a toll.  

Becca Campbell, Senior Onboarding Engineer at Moovila, specializes in uncovering inefficiencies in MSP project management methods.  

Here are some of the hidden costs she has found with popular “good enough” project management practices. 

A fast track to inaccurate timelines  

The biggest tariff these informal systems take happens immediately.  

“At the beginning of every project, clients want to know the timeline,” explains Campbell. “That's the first question you always get.”  

It takes time to create a project spreadsheet and to build out a timeline. But that is time you don’t have. Without a robust system that allows you to plug in a new project and see how it impacts all the work in your portfolio, you don’t have the answer the client wants at the beginning of the project.  

You don’t want to say you don’t know. So, you make an educated guess, based on a gut feeling about the work you have and what the project entails. 

That guesstimate becomes the client’s expectation.  

Before anyone has had time to set up a spreadsheet or look at calendars, you have committed to an unrealistic timeline. When you try to make this timeline fit into the workload your team is already carrying, it impacts everything from managed services to processes to other project work. To keep work on track, you start compressing timelines. 

“Different project managers might lack insight into the team’s time commitment elsewhere,” says Campbell.

“But any changes you make to

a project to speed up the timeline

will impact other projects.”  

You might not think of projects as your core work. But this chaos will affect all the work you do, as well as your customers and employees – often in insidious ways.  

The price of an angry client 

When a client asks for a timeline, that is a great opportunity to set the right expectation. If you give them a realistic schedule, they can plan accordingly.  

“It's not that clients get upset when there are delays,” says Campbell. “They get upset when this is not communicated early on.” 

If you propose a realistic timeline from the beginning and have systems that quickly identify delays and issues in advance as the project proceeds, you give clients time to adjust their plans and expectations. If you commit to an impossible timeline, miss delivery dates, and fail to warn them, your customers get mad.  

The cost of unhappy clients can be substantial. You might lose them, as well as their goodwill and any recommendations they might have made to people in their network. Those that don’t leave will become demanding, which wreaks havoc on other projects and services as you try to accommodate these demands.  

“This can lead to dissatisfaction for the angry client as well as those who are not the squeaky wheel,” says Campbell. 

Inaccurate project scoping 

Working under the gun, because of compressed timelines, often means team members take shortcuts. Those shortcuts, too, can drain profits and resources.  

“How are your engineers tracking time?” asks Campbell. Maybe they jot it into that shared spreadsheet at the end of the week, estimating or guessing, after the fact. Perhaps they don’t log some of those hours, though, for fear of exceeding the project’s scope.  

“I often see managers, coordinators, and even technical resources doing things to keep clients happy, when projects are running late, and not recording that time,” says Campbell. 

This is especially true when it comes to tracking project management time. 

“People are often less focused on tracking the project manager's time,” says Campbell. “If they're not billing for it, they don't set the expectation that project managers should log that time.” 

When you pair inaccurate time tracking with a system that doesn’t stop for a post-project reality check to compare the estimate against what unfolded, your project scopes will be full of holes.  

“I often see MPS that have templatized certain types of projects but are not going back, after the fact, to review how close to accurate those templates are,” says Campbell. 

You can’t know if a project is profitable or if the scope is accurate without accurate time tracking. And without a checkpoint to evaluate how well the scope matched what happened, you could put leaky, underbid project plans on repeat.  

Increased support time  

When projects happen under the gun for unhappy clients, taking customer calls, calming the client, and finding a solution eats support time. 

This kind of chaos has tendrils that can reach into the future.  

“Some hidden costs happen down the road from this ‘problem project,’” says Campbell. “Maybe three months from now, that project client has an issue and calls the support team.” Because the project was executed on a compressed timeline, details about it are missing or inaccurate in your records.  

“This adds to the support time this issue requires,” she says. “It can lead to dispatching the wrong solution or wasting time digging through records to find the right information. And now the client is frustrated with the support side of house.” 

Your team is approaching burnout 

“When your customers aren't happy, your employees are struggling,” says Campbell. “That can lead to burnout.”  

Chaos is stressful. 

“It can create tension between team members,” she says. “Maybe the project coordinator isn’t getting the information they need, so they take on extra work to verify when tasks get done.” This leads to some – often your best – people feeling like they are doing more work than is their responsibility. They might attempt to fix the system. But without the right tools or authority, this only adds to their frustration. 

“The fix – better processes and outlining expectations around time tracking – needs to come from the top,” says Campbell. “You can't operate under this type of stress for every type of project. It's not sustainable.” 

Metrics that help identify your PM problems 

Maybe your project management solution is good enough. Or maybe it is racking up costs that are hard to see. Tracking some key metrics can help uncover where your system leaks and where it works. 

Budgeted versus actual hours 

One fast way to see if your projects leak time and money is to compare the hours you scoped for that project against the hours your people spent on it.  

“Along with that, though, you have to promote that people need to track time accurately on projects,” says Campbell. If people aren’t tracking their hours accurately, this number won’t tell you much.  

This comparison, if hours are tracked accurately, can be an eye opener. 

Project durations 

Another number to look at is your project durations.  

“Really look at the overall durations of your different types of projects,” says Campbell. “If projects are staying open for extended amounts of time, you're not effectively closing them out and moving to the next thing.”  

This can be because small tasks seem less important to your team than the new emergency they are facing. But that can mean that those small tasks never get completed or that projects are never closed because of them, which delays when you can invoice. 

On time delivery 

“Look at projects that are tracking late compared to the original due date,” says Campbell.  

This metric can show you how good those initial guesstimates are and what happens to projects once they meet the rest of your portfolio, encounter delays, or hit other snags. 

This will also help you track how often you deliver your projects when you said you would, which can shine light on your customer relationships and reputation. 

Once you put on a detective’s hat and point a magnifying glass at your project management system, you might find that your “good enough” system is sneaking off with more profits than is healthy for your bottom line. You will also know where to focus when you decide to improve client relationships, team morale, and earnings.  

Curious about how these hidden costs keep your projects dragging on forever? Watch our recent webinar featuring Jared Sangeorzan from GadellNet Consulting for more.