Outsourcing - the cost effective long term project management solution

The majority of organisations today, no longer have the permanent headcount to deliver complicated projects on their own and often sustain significant cost escalation, loss of benefit realisation and drop in credibility with missed delivery dates and failed projects.

Outsourcing project office and/or project management functions helps to significantly improve the overall operational effectiveness of the project management function. Through outsourcing, our clients realise a higher project success rate and see an increased perception value in the overall project management competency within the organisation.

In addition, by working with a skilled consultancy practice, in-house staff benefit from a valuable knowledge transfer that can enhance the existing understanding of the key elements of project management and project performance.

Below is a summary of the benefits that Positive Impact Consulting can deliver through project management outsourcing:

Reduced costs: eliminates the need to invest in internal project management training and infrastructure development and eliminates the need to recruit and assimilate project management specialists for unique situations.

Improved time to market: improved predictability of performance that provides certainty of change outcome, increased speed of product to market place, comparable with upper quartile.

A framework for continuous improvement: by bringing ‘ready made’ processes, staff and support services to jump-start the entire project management function. We coach and mentor internal staff as well and reduce the burdens of managing projects in house.

Decreased employee turnover: turnover costs for a project manager average 150% of the employee’s salary. This includes tangible costs such as hiring and re-locating new employees and intangible costs such as inefficiency and lost productivity whilst the job is vacant.

Improved customer satisfaction: we assist client organisations to achieve new levels of efficiency and product and service quality, customer satisfaction is the key to growing sales and profit.

Outsourcing options: which is right for you?

Use both internal staff and external consultant resources to manage projects (the most common type)

Positive Impact Consulting provides professional project managers on an on demand basis. This allows client organisations to continue to use their own methodology. Positive Impact consultants then assess the state of the deployment and adherence to the existing methodology and can train and mentor incumbent staff in its use.

Positive Impact consultants are on hand to manage the more complex, unique or difficult-to-staff projects. In addition, internal staff have access to coaching and mentoring from the Positive Impact Consulting team. The principle benefit to the client organisation being that they only pay for the outsourcing staff required and cultural resistance among internal staff is less likely.

The principle benefits to this option are many and include:

• Steering troubled projects back on track immediately
• Coaching and mentoring internal project managers and staff to improve morale and personnel performance
• Boosting productivity and tightening efficiency with resource management tools and techniques.
• Decreasing time to market with a more disciplined approach to managing the projects.

If you are understaffed and lack the time, resources and knowledge to effectively manage your mission critical projects, then outsourcing may very well be a viable solution. By outsourcing your project management needs to our team of experts, your company can stay nimble and reap the benefits of effective project management much more quickly and ultimately, more affordably than ever before.

Outsource the entire project office function

You may choose to install/develop, manage and maintain the project office at a project, program or enterprise level under managed service arrangements. Positive Impact Consulting can either provide the project management methodology and train internal project staff in its use or enhance existing methods and ensure they are correctly deployed and managed against and can recommend and implement project management software and train staff in its use.

Our fully trained team of skilled project managers, planners and control personnel plan, manage and complete all projects in a timely and cost-effective manner and during the initial implementation phase, change management and communications plans are developed to facilitate acceptance by the existing organisation.

The advantages of outsourcing the entire project management process are clear and include:

• Project management best practices are immediately available
• Projects are led and managed by an expert team of personnel
• No up-front investments and recruiting costs are required
• The project office team is on hand to coach and mentor staff
• Changes to staff are easily made to adjust to changes in requirements