How Much Does Disengagement Cost Your Project Management Office?

It is no secret that disengagement in a project management office leads to several negative outcomes. In our previous blog, we discussed some of the problems associated with disengaged project managers, including how project management departments underperform due to disengagement. However, do you know how much disengagement costs your project management office? You may not be aware of the multitude of mistakes disengaged project managers make and how it affects your company. Each of these mistakes requires additional work to be taken on, creating a frustrating – yet entirely preventable – domino effect.

Recognizing Mistakes Made Due to Disengagement

For nearly 20 years, Enterey Consulting’s life science consultants have been helping clients integrate improvement strategies to assess and improve engagement. In this article, we will share with you the top three errors that can occur in a project management department due to disengagement, and how much these errors can cost your office.

A Simple Yet Frustrating Error

The first important mistake made due to disengagement is a simple one that can be addressed and remedied by the project manager: typos. Although typos are a momentary interruption, they still disrupt workflow by creating further unnecessary work. With a disengaged project manager, typos can run rampant due to distraction. You may not even realize how much extra effort simple typos can create in an assignment. When a project manager is focusing more of their time on fixing typo errors, it costs your company time that could be better spent on other projects. Every mistake that a project manager makes also inevitably requires extra work to be taken on by someone else, which may even end up impacting the quality of decisions made by managers higher up in the chain of command. By remedying processes and encouraging project managers to become more engaged, excessive typos can be prevented.

Time is Wasted When Passing Along Flawed Information

A second important mistake made by disengaged project managers is a departmental mistake. If a project manager produces a mistake in one part of the project management chain, it creates a domino effect by slowing down the entire chain and adding to the overall workload for everyone involved. After the initial manager creates the mistake, the next person in line must either spend time remedying that mistake or sending the work back to the original project manager to correct. This extra time spent inevitably takes away valuable time from other tasks at hand and causes overall frustration amongst the office. Work is unnecessarily being done twice, yet there is still only one outcome. Energy and time is wasted when a report is made with flawed information from the start and creates too much back-and-forth between co-workers.

Errors Reduce Your Company’s Profit

Finally, the third arguably most important mistake that project managers make due to disengagement is one that costs the company financially - and no one wants that! When a project with errors leaves the project management department and enters the hands of senior management, senior management then ends up using a flawed report with bad data. This can be an expensive mistake. Imagine that senior management has made a commitment outside of the company, and they can no longer hit a deadline due to the disengaged project manager’s data error within a report. Errors such as this reduce profit, which is the last thing a company wants. It is crucial to know how many of these errors are occurring and how much it costs your company.

Join our Webinar to Prevent these Mistakes

Unfortunately, disengaged project managers cost your project management office quite a lot of unnecessary frustration when errors are occurring. From small typo errors, internal mistakes, and mistakes that lead to large financial loss, disengagement causes several different kinds of negative outcomes. Luckily, here at Enterey Consulting we have not only the experience but also the knowledge to minimize disengagement in your project management department. We have documented techniques, processes, and procedures that we can share to improve engagement while simultaneously improving morale.

Attend our Webinar on October 26^th to learn how to identify, minimize, and eliminate these errors in your project management office!