Project teams have a lot to do, but they don’t need to tackle everything alone. Developing a partnership with a project management consultancy can help your group approach initiatives from a more strategic perspective and enable your organization to build a highly proficient, coordinated, and united project environment. With support from an experienced partner, your organization can achieve better project outcomes and more consistent results.
There are powerful tools and techniques a project management consultancy can help your team put into place to enhance visibility across all stakeholder groups. For example, it isn’t easy to document details while a large and complex project is underway. Once the initiative is completed, many of those more minor elements will have been forgotten. A project management partner provides the processes to capture information as the project progresses. This results in a more comprehensive record of what was done and delivers valuable visibility into what’s required to move a project from planning to completion.
When project participants can see what’s happening and what’s scheduled to happen, they can communicate more effectively, ask relevant questions, provide additional context, and correct misperceptions or errors. A project partner can also help the team develop consistency in the language and methodology used across all stakeholder groups. A uniform approach to project management supports better communication because everyone uses words, definitions, and measures in the same way. Whether it’s discussing the controlling path or assessing the state of near-term critical activities, all stakeholders share the same understanding of what’s happening and what’s needed to ensure project success.
The support from your project partner enables team members to improve their strategic focus. Project management leaders often become entangled in timelines and activity sequences. Unfortunately, when they’re caught in the minutiae of what’s currently taking place, they don’t get a chance to look ahead and see what’s on the horizon. With a project management consultancy working as an extension of your internal team to coordinate those day-to-day elements, leaders can finally step back and put more foresight into what’s happening weeks or months down the road. That full-scope perspective allows the team to utilize skills more effectively, allocate resources more efficiently, and capture economies of scale and other opportunities.
A partnership with an experienced project management consultancy empowers your team to increase efficiency and accountability. Adopting a proven methodology across the stakeholder base allows team members to agree upon and establish clear timelines and responsibilities. This avoids duplicating efforts or rehashing task assignments every time something changes. And with clear sightlines across who is doing what and when, everyone is accountable to the group for their activities. This gives team members ownership of their tasks and puts other activities, including executing weekly controls, monitoring project metrics, and facilitating discussions around concerns or conflicts into the hands of your project partner. The full-circle view and comprehensive documentation that a project consultancy provides also gives your team important historical data to improve future planning efforts and identify areas for optimization. Together, these elements make the project environment more cohesive and proactive, which increases the likelihood your team will achieve its desired outcomes.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.