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The Fox and the Hen House
On contracted initiatives, the outside consultant project manages the implementation, but organizations must still appoint their own "inside" project manager to track the actual work, or the focus on cost is bound to get blurry.
There are a host of reasons why projects fail. While there are many causes — cost overruns, failure to properly plan for change, inability to meet timeless — a common root problem often lies underneath: The projects are controlled and implemented by the same contractor. In any process where one party is responsible for both execution and evaluation, you’ve got a prescription for trouble. It’s easy to predict the results when the fox is guarding the hen house.
Effective project management demands the separation of project management from project implementation. Failing to separate them increases the likelihood a consulting company’s internal pressures will come in conflict with, or take precedence over, the needs of the client. This can keep costs higher than required in order to meet a consulting company’s goals for profitability and resource utilization.
It’s been estimated that for every dollar military officials spend purchasing back-office software, they spend another $15 deploying it. Effective project management significantly reduces this ratio. But when a project manager is part of the same team implementing the project, pressures from …
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'Human existence must be a kind of error. It may be said of it: "It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens."' - Arthur Schopenhauer |