When Should You Hire a Project Management Consultant?

Signs that an outside perspective is warranted

Project management difficulties rarely set in overnight. They show up as symptoms that the team eventually comes to see as normal, for lack of perspective. When several of these signs appear together, an outside opinion can help break the deadlock.

• Milestones slip at every committee meeting with no shared explanation
• Nobody trusts the schedule, which is no longer updated
• Steering committees share information but no longer make decisions
• Several projects compete for the same resources with no arbitration
• Each project manager produces their own reporting, which can’t be compared with the others
• A project manager is left alone with a project of unprecedented scale

Five typical consulting engagements

A project review involves examining an ongoing project, its deliverables, schedule and governance to produce a diagnosis and recommendations. A turnaround goes further: the consultant helps replan, renegotiate the scope and restore credible management in the eyes of the sponsors.

Setting up or overhauling a PMO aims to give the organization a consolidated view of its portfolio: prioritization rules, shared metrics, governance routines. Defining a methodological framework, for example one inspired by PM² or PMP good practices, gives teams shared templates and vocabulary. Finally, one-on-one support for a project manager helps them make decisions on their own project while developing their skills.

Consultant, training or hiring: choosing the right response

Not every difficulty calls for consulting. If the team knows the methodology but struggles with its scheduling tool, targeted Microsoft Project training will be a better fit. If the organization has a lasting shortage of project management capacity, hiring or reorganizing is needed. Consulting is relevant when you need to solve a specific problem, design a system or support a transformation.

At Dyonysos, custom consulting and training are designed to complement each other: the right format depends on the expected outcome, whether that is getting to grips with a tool, professionalizing a team, solving a project problem or leading a broader transformation. In fact, a consulting engagement often leads to a training need identified along the way.

Scope the engagement to get a tangible result

A poorly scoped engagement quickly turns into open-ended operational backup in disguise. The scoping should specify what the organization expects at the end of the engagement, and how it will know that the objective has been met.

The PMO consultant or project management consultant must also have real access to information: project documents, interviews with the teams, attendance at steering meetings. Without that access, the recommendations will remain theoretical.

• State the problem to be solved in one or two sentences
• Define the expected deliverables: diagnosis, roadmap, templates, dashboard
• Appoint an internal sponsor with decision-making authority
• List the contacts and documents available
• Schedule checkpoints to redirect the engagement if necessary

Plan for the post-engagement period to avoid dependency

The risk with a consulting engagement is that practices slip back as soon as the consultant leaves. To prevent this, skills transfer must be planned from the scoping stage: the internal team co-builds the tools rather than receiving them ready-made, and a point person is appointed to keep them alive.

Deliverables should be documented and suited to the organization’s actual maturity level. A sophisticated dashboard that nobody knows how to update will be abandoned within a few weeks; a simple template that people understand and take ownership of will last.