Management consulting specifies both the industry and the practice of, helping organizations improve their performance through the analysis of existing business problems and development of plans for improvement. For a number of reasons project managers hire the services of management consultants including getting external advice and access to the consultants’ specialized expertise. Management consultants generally carry their own, proprietary methodologies or frameworks to steer the identification of problems to provide as the basis for recommendations for more effective or efficient ways of performing project completion. As the project management is hiring external competency was seen as a normal way to face and tackle a business problem, this is referred to as a “contractual” relation to project management. Project management demands to management consulting as because it allows managing teams and work with different teams on the new projects, work in different cultural environments. Being exposed to various architectures, systems, manage time and efforts against very specific deliverables, work in multiple departments or areas and thus being able to gain insight into the ways of managing projects by looking at different angles and listening to the management consultant’s different points of view.

Because of the exposure to and relationships with many organizations, consulting firms are also said to be conscious of industry “best practices”. Although the impact of this practice from one organization to another may be problematic based on the situation under consideration. In some areas of the world this trend is now being altered where the organizations are quickly rebuilding the management consulting departments to demonstrate the corporate websites for clients.

There is several potential usefulness of for mangement consultants when they get the knowledge of project management. After properly managed and empowered, consulting groups advice and engaged projects in light of the corporation’s strategic and tactical objectives. In this case the project management gives a clear benefit to the management consultant as the consultants easily provide advices in the alignment of the corporation’s strategies.

Often, the consultant requires some ramps up time on a project due to familiarity with the corporation. This enables to guide a project through to implementation as the consultant gets the knowledge of project management. This consulting position can be used to recruit and develop potential senior managers of the organization. Corporations have to be conscious of and consistent with how consultant costs are accounted for on both a project and organizational level to implement cost effectiveness.

Consultants are often uniquely matched to lead consulting project teams. Then the consultants can act as the organizational subject matter under the direction of the organizational management. Again, management consulting firms can closely monitor and work to manage the project. That ensures a project manager better delivery, quality and overall satisfactory operating relationship with clients. Project management will also help you to convince a consultant’s clients that s/he can add real value to their business and that the cost of your consulting service is easily justified. Anyone will be able to create more convincing client proposals, improve pre-sales arena and market offering, show clients the project delivery framework, convince clients that will add value, win more work from new clients. Thus project management helps you to advance your consulting skills by adopting best practice processes and standards.

So if you’re a consultant and you want to win more clients, improve your delivery and boost your consulting skills, you must have a basic idea of project management.

Project Management has lots of advantages, including: Shorter implementation time, improved product quality, improved team productivity, better documentation.

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. When any consultant provide the consultancy service, it is sometimes conflated with program management, however technically a program is actually a higher level construct: a group of related and somehow interdependent projects. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management. So, project management may need a consultancy service to make a clear distinction the project. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived project constraints. Management consulting emphasizes the effectiveness of the upcoming of upcoming projects. Consultancies may also provide organizational change management assistance, development of coaching skills, technology implementation, strategy development, or operational improvement services .These all services may be required for a project manager. Management consultants generally bring their own, proprietary methodologies or frameworks to guide the identification of problems, and to serve as the basis for recommendations for more effective or efficient ways of performing business tasks. For this type of suggestions, the consultant people should have the touch of project management knowledge.

This is the part 2 of the 2 part series “Companies Failure to Implement A Basic Project Management Methodology”

The importance of benchmark: How others made it best on their course for implementation of a PM methodology

Without any reference you cannot set up your benchmark that you want to achieve. Any process is troubled unless the leader know where they want to go and where they are right now. Organizations should consider feedback in order to acknowledge whether the performance is in composition with the industry. Sometimes at the strategic level organizations forgot to benchmark their performance. It is always important to look at the best performers. Organizations should aware of the way they succeeded to the top; to learn from their past experience and to make sure they can avoid any undesired mistakes. For starting implementing a project management methodology without paying attention to the best performers can lead to more encountered problems and mistakes that can prove time consuming and costly. Such approach can lead nowhere. So, it is good to get some knowledge about the around world. Organizations should therefore take a picture of the around business world and then place itself in the broader picture. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats (SWOT) analysis should be conducted as a first step to set some objectives and to set the model to follow.

When the “target” is secured, an in depth analysis can be run to see what the quantitative limitation look like for the organization. At this point it is extremely important for the people doing the comparative analysis to establish appropriate standards for interpreting the performances for a particular project at a given Company. Normal standards can normally be followed in the analysis: earned value techniques, time schedule baseline vs. actual implementation time etc. Certainly, other standards can be predicted. In order to keep the analysis as simple as possible, a minimum and most relevant set of parameters must be established.

Thus, benchmarking works fine if a top down approach from the executives to the PM level occur.

Some of these parameters should be observed and dissected in small pieces for a thorough understanding before using them as standards for the organization. Companies frequently ignore the importance of benchmarking and they struggle or go astray as a result. It should be told that a correction at the beginning of process can be more easily done than later. Because at later stage the processes are linked to each other and as a result the organization follows rules and methodology in error or in a wrong direction.

It would be useful for more companies to accept the rule and practice of benchmarking as a strategic tool for setting ground rules and tactical measures when it comes to PM methodology..

The article presented was aimed to show some of the major drawbacks that companies sometimes face when trying to implement a new or better PM methodology. The damage starts with the matrix structure misinterpretation and then can evolve through the lack of PMO. It happens especially when the organizations ignore the importance of benchmarking. The situation is less severe for organizations at the starting point on the course of PM methodology and worse for those already on the way.

So, in conclusion we can say that the damage is starts primarily through the wrongly designed matrix structure. Then it goes ahead without the inception of PMO. At last the project methodology fails for not determining the benchmark in context of the organization.

This is the part one of the 2 part series of “Companies Failure to Implement A Basic Project Management Methodology”.

Project Management is now become an extremely important topic for discussion and it assumes that this trend will increase even further in the future. The Project Manager is a professional individual who has gained sustained and strong credentials throughout the world. Like individuals, organizations try to adjust and improve their behavior for better image in the market. They are also keen to follow methodologies, procedures, rules, and tactics in order to become existing actors in certain fields of project management application and in the marketplace. There are some major problems of how companies try to implement project management methodologies.

Wrongly design the matrix structure of the organization

At present, with the continuous buzz around concepts like Project Management, Program Management, and Project Management Office, organizations have understood that they must quickly embrace their strategic vision to the latest breakthrough before any other respected competitor does so. In this disorder of organizational changes, companies can be easily misled in a wrong direction if their strategic plans and organizational structures are not examined by professional experts with proven abilities related to re-engineering and restructuring.

Companies have spotted out that the matrix structure is the most convenient deal for combining operations and project implementation. Consultant, or in some many cases managers from inside the companies, have dealt with some of these topics. In many cases, however, people with less skills and abilities were appointed to run the business whether or not they were educated and trained. Organizational structures were altered to make entities smaller and more profitable within certain companies. It is only the case of implementation of profit-cost centers; no matter what and when at any level. Then major conflicts and inconsistency occurred when the new born structures, in fact tried to help the organization, proved in the end to be a major drawback, even when the company had thought its project structure was based on a their matrix concept.

It is not difficult to understand that when each individual entity is running after its own goals in terms of profitability, the synergistic actions may be very unlikely to maintain their projects on the good track.

Having the power of a single and genuine Project Manager lessened and shared with other Project Managers from supporting departments leads to a double conflict. It leads to a situation despite that normally taking place between the PM and the Functional Managers. Usually the Project Manager must need the services from the Engineering Department (for basic and detailed design), from the Procurement Department (for administer the orders and gods payment) and also from the Logistics Department (for transporting goods to the site) and all these adjoin to the expenses under budget execution. It is by far more complicated and difficult for a Project Manager to be responsible and accountable for the results within a certain project when he must cope up with such an organizational mess. Everyone is eager to see the financial improvement on their side rather than general interest deriving from the project implementation. The Project Manager in charge of project implementation must thus face tight budgetary constraints and needs to settle more than necessary with supporting entities, exactly those people who should be assigned within the project team.

These sorts of Companies do not understand that the only person in charge, as per the Project Charter, to run project business should be the Project Manager from the Project Management Department. Other individuals should support and give the utmost to this person for the project sake. The bottom line is then making the road to project failure, or at least an extremely rocky road, is now paved for our Project Manager. The power weakens due to the sharing with other artificial project managers on the same level. Thus the divergent interest among functional departments in their permanent endeavor is to maximize their own profit instead of working for project success.

Less Concern about the knowledge of PMO (Project Management Office)

Inexperienced managers of companies who want to take a step toward project methodology implementation inside the organizational culture should either establish a project management office or hire experienced consultants. This project management office must be in the upper level of project management department. Inexplicably, some organizations either at the beginning of their PM methodology cycle or at a later stage pay no attention to the importance of a PMO. This should be the core of any enterprise in project management methodology. PMO is the storehouse of all kinds of past history and lessons learned out, templates, procedures, and so on. A better insight can be given by a PMO, but organizations are not always mature enough to understand their acute need for such office. At the beginning of project management methodology implementation, for example, it could be less costly in terms of money spent. It needs less time to get a group of skilled individuals within a PMO to start top-down operation of experience and expertise. It can start as a pilot project and then, based on success, use to upcoming projects. Organizations which do not have a PMO in the structure should better think about before proceeding on experimental basis without it and with the complicated structure. It is surely more comfortable to get to help Project Managers and to make the project successes.

Organizations try to perceive establishing a PMO as a money spending exercise rather than thinking beyond the short term costs of setting and maintaining this expertise center within the Company. When judging on a short term basis and not being able to see the pay offs on the course of Project or Program implementation, it might happen that the companies will not see the image of full benefits. So, from early stage, one can be more interested in no sacrifice to obtain the benefits of implementing a PMO.