Project Management Top 10 Problems

This isn't my list. But you can see this one here:

The Top 10 Mistakes

These all ring so true.
For instance, #2 :

Believe that good scheduling software makes one a good project manager

Forget it! Like the post says, many people just get frustrated with Project thinking it will be like Excel and eventually give up. 

There is a learning curve to this and it takes time (like with any new skill) to master it. 

Project Plans are a personal matter!

Project Management is a very personal thing. It takes time to develop your own style and individual approach to the discipline. My recommendation is to try different things until you hit on something that works for you. And then share it. Despite all the standardization that the PMI has done with the discipline, you need to find ways to make it your own.
For instance, I hated using MS Project. I always had trouble with it, mostly because I never really dived in to learn it thoroughly.

So I went to an Excel spreadsheet to model project plans (which I stole from a colleague). I created a daily chart and color-coded it. I insert comments for each task and put down the # of hours I spent on each task. Voila! I have a written record of how I spend my time each day. I duplicated this sheet and made it weekly. So now I literally have a roadmap of all my releases for the next few months. I thought I was fine managing from Excel only.
However, I came back to MS Project because I realized I couldn't properly get good end-dates and that Excel won't calculate these and take into account weekends and holidays. In MS Project, I found that you can even adjust working hours! Then, as I got more and more interested, I realized the value of baselining and comparing actuals to the baseline and computing earned value (the holy grail! but still a work in progress).

It is not a simple thing to model real-life tasks in a software tool. But as I got familiar with Fixed Units, Fixed Duration, Fixed Work, & the various constraints & dependencies, this got easier. Now I'm in a position to more realistically model project tasks.

Now I flit back and forth b/w Excel & Project. Each gives me a unique way of managing my projects. I have a roadmap view, I have a log of how I spend my hours, I can see the progress of my project, etc. Someone could easily say that it takes too much time and I only need to use Project for everything. But I like this method. I feel I have more control and oversight of my domain. So you see, Project Management can be a very personal thing.

What's important is that you're able to manage. Managing by objective is key. If I give a due date for a project, it's important for me to constantly see if we're getting closer or we're slipping. That's all that matters. Not how pretty my project plan is or whether I use Excel, Project or a piece of paper.

BA & PM Personalities

Bear with me on this one...It occurred recently to me (and it jives with personal experience) that:

• A PM should be pushy in order to get things moving and done
• A BA should be inquisitive and customer-focused

If you have the personalities reversed:

• A PM who is not so aggressive and who wants to gain consensus and make things right before commencing on a project, you might wait a loooong time before a project gets done.
• A BA who is pushy & aggressive is the most dangerous; they can really throw your project off because the BA may not gather all the details necessary to do a thorough analysis, does not listen to all the nuances and communications a stakeholder emits; s/he may not communicate all the details to the development team because they're off to the next project, etc.