The Top 5 Reasons Why Organisations Use an External Project Manager
A project manager is someone who is in overall charge of the planning and execution of a particular project. That’s quite a large brief! In my experience, it includes:
- getting the best out of people
- exerting influence
- mentoring
- managing expectations
- having an eye for detail
- understanding quality and standards in the context of project objectives
- making decisions that are in the interest of the overall project
But why do more and more organisations use external help when it comes to implementing their own projects?
I guess one of the reasons that I am asked to project manage for my clients is that there is already a relationship and the trust is there.
But speaking to other companies whom I have managed projects for without a previous working relationship was quite interesting. Collectively, here are the 5 main reasons why my clients opted for me to manage their projects over assigning them internally:
- Our staff respond in a much more positive way when dealing with external resource
- None of us have the time to manage so many different people and their contributions to the project
- If we did it ourselves the scope would change 1000 times and it would never get done
- We never even thought of defining the risks associated with our project. Your expertise ensured risks and issues were identified and managed from the outset.
- You applied structure to the project, whereas we would have created an Excel chart and hoped it would work.
Are any of these familiar to you?
Number 1 was an interesting answer. Why do you think staff respond better to an ‘outsider’ rather than to a colleague?
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