Outsourced Project Management: A New Era

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.

  Organizational Project Management   Outsourcing   Resource Management  

Today there is more variation in project management than ever before. As organizations focus on delivery of business benefits for those initiatives that align with strategic priorities, so project managers with business skills have become more important.

At the same time, initiatives focused on maintaining organizational capability have seen a decrease in the requirement for those general business skills. Instead, there has been an increase in the demand for project managers who can combine technical project management abilities with specialized knowledge and skills.

This separation seems set to continue, with increasing demands for specialized project managers for specialized needs. The increasing pace of evolution within organizations means that there will always be enough work for these specialized functions, and at the same time it is driving the expansion of project management globally.

However, as this divergence between different types of project managers continues, there will be additional trends developing that seek to take advantage of the changing project landscape. It’s one of those emerging trends I want to look at in more detail today—the idea that project management, or at least some project management, can become an outsourced function.

PMs who focus on business skills will always need to remain within the organization they work for; that…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.