Business Consulting Project Life Cycle

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The  benefits of disciplined project management have been proven by many years of practice in various industries, for different types of projects and team sizes. This article will cover some of the specific challenges facing project managers who run business-consulting projects.

There are many different types of consulting projects— engineering-centric, strategy-focused, human resource related, and so forth. This article concentrates on discussing business-consulting projects (when a consulting company is brought in to solve a specific business problem). A typical project has two important characteristics that drive additional challenges from the project management perspective:

1. Relatively short project duration (<6 months)
2. Highly variable scope/deliverables

It is particularly important to apply project management rigor to running business-consulting projects, although it may be tempting not to do so because of the initial investment of time required for planning (and time is always in demand, given the short project duration and extensive amount of work required). Having a detailed, resource-loaded plan in place and tracking to it allow the team to stay focused on the objectives and not get bogged down in the day-to-day requirements of the client.

Project Initiation

The consulting project life cycle usually starts with the &…

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