Unrealistic Project Deadlines

Stop Stressing Over Unrealistic Project Deadlines

3 min read

Your team missed another project deadline, but that’s not a surprise for you. You knew the project plan wasn’t realistic. Many factors were overlooked including other projects being worked on simultaneously, planned vacation and everyday distractions that always come up. The problem is that the people setting the project timelines don’t have a clear picture of all those factors.

The First Step is Project Portfolio Management

The answer isn’t that your team should work overtime to ensure the deadline is met. Your organization needs more than just project management. It needs project portfolio management (PPM). With project portfolio management, your company can identify the most strategic projects, prioritize them and realistically plan based on available capacity. Project portfolio management can be summed up as doing the most important projects at the best possible time with the most skilled and available people.

Project Portfolio Management is Simple with Lean PPM™ & Meisterplan

Lean PPM™ is a framework developed by Meisterplan that makes portfolio management easy. Included in the Lean PPM™ framework are all the roles, tools and meetings your organization needs to complete project plans on time and ensure your entire portfolio is successful. Meisterplan’s cloud-based software was designed to support Lean PPM™ and when used together, you get a visual roadmap that allows you to optimize the amount of work you can achieve.

“Meisterplan filled a significant gap for us in understanding how we are utilizing our capacity. We now have a much better idea when we need to either say no to new projects or adjust timelines and team members assigned to projects. No other tool gave us this high-level view. It brought our stress level down.”

– Bredon Jones, Vice President Operations, Giant Hat

Improve Project Plans for Your Entire Organization

When PPM is done right, decision-makers understand the benefits, tradeoffs, and investments of each project, and can make informed decisions about what work can realistically get done. By using Meisterplan and the Lean PPM™ framework, you can continue to use the project management tools and methods that work best for you, while management gets a clear visual representation of your organization’s projects as well as employee workloads and their actual capacities. This means they can quickly and easily detect any issues that come up and find new solutions when it’s impossible to complete projects as planned.

Advantages for Project Managers
  • See your team capacity at a glance
  • Clearly prioritize and position each project
  • Make project value and financial investments transparent to upper management
  • Maintain control over how work is executed
Advantages for Management
  • Get a clear view of project plans, value and investments for easy evaluation and approval
  • Easily align corporate investments to strategic objectives
  • Show the impact of proposed changes to the portfolio in real-time
  • Display Agile and non-Agile work together to make better decisions

Feasible Project Plans Equals Less Stress For You

Facing looming project deadlines that are impossible to meet and the struggle to accomplish unrealistic project plans is now a thing of the past. At Meisterplan, we understand the effort that goes into executing a successful project portfolio, which is why we developed a software and framework that keep project portfolio management lean and easily achievable. This allows organizations to scale quickly and gives management the transparency needed to set realistic project plans. To see how Meisterplan can help your organization complete more projects on time, start a free 30 day trial or request a personal one-on-one demo with one of our experts today.

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