Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
The Key to Contractors
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
You don’t need me to tell you that we are going through some rather tough economic times. Companies across the globe are being forced to rationalize workforces and take a hard look at where savings can be made. But the work still has to get done, and in many cases that means turning to contract resources. Contractors aren’t immune from tough economic times, but there are opportunities with organizations that cannot afford to maintain some specialized skills in their permanent workforce, and instead “buy in” those skills as the need arises. But with tighter margins, increased competition for project funding and higher pressure to deliver, how do organizations ensure that they are maximizing their return on contract resources?
Define the work--all of it
The process of determining whether a contractor is needed is usually fairly straightforward--a need for specific skills that aren’t available in the permanent employee base (or aren’t available in sufficient quantities), but where that skill set is not likely to be required beyond the current project. There are exceptions of course, but let’s work on that assumption--you are buying in expertise on a project to achieve a set of defined goals.
The obvious next step is to define what those goals are, and this is where things usually start to go wrong. It sounds so simple--…
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