Cully Perlman posted about hiring project management consultants today. Some of the benefits cited include:
1. Bringing in someone from the outside helps clarify what you may already think is clear.
2. Paying someone to work just on process improvement will get the job done faster.
3. Bringing in someone that isn’t assigned other projects will allow that person to focus, and thus allow them to be more effective.
4. Another set of eyes and experiences that will help strengthen the experience of your current PM organization.
5. You may just have your next project manager already working for you.
Another huge thing that an outside project management consultant can provide is a customized methodology that works for your organization, and is repeatable for all projects. Walking a team through a methodology and refining it as you go can be extremely valuable for conforming it to the culture and ensure usability and buy-in.
One thing external consultants can run into is the “we didn’t make it here” factor. To me, it’s critical that the consultant not dictate processes, but instead help the teams formulate their own. It may be that the consultant presents several ways to approach an issue and leaves it up to the organization to choose which provides the best starting point to start the customization process from.
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There are many theoretical frameworks for project management, quality, general management, etc. I’m convinced that above a particular threshold, all of them are nearly equally valid. Some may be better in specific areas than others, and some may apply better across a broad class of situations. Others just don’t work well in any scenario, and those die.
For project management frameworks, you have PMBOK, PRINCE2, RUP, SDLC, TenStep, etc. For methodologies there are Agile variants, waterfall, spiral, Critical Chain, etc. The list goes on and on. Note that there are significant numbers of organizations that utilize their own preferred framework and methodology, and (hopefully) most get good results from their use. Look at two companies implementing the same methodology and you’ll see they don’t implement it the same way.
The important thing is that you embrace a theoretical framework that can be used to guide strategic and tactical decisions. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a pure form from the original source, or a modified version, etc. The primary benefit comes from having a standard of some sort that helps achieve results.
On a somewhat related digression, check out my first article in a series of 6 over at Projects@Work. The comments I received so far are great, and I want to point out something that is related to this topic. A few of the readers seemed upset that I took an established concept, Deming’s 14 Points, and wrote a modified piece using Deming as a foundation.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to follow the original form of a framework or methodology if it works. There’s also nothing wrong with modifying the standard to better fit your needs. In this case, I took a kernel from each of Deming’s 14 points I felt was relevant to project management and built on it from there.