Project management skills are essential for consultants for a variety of reasons. Project management is a critical skill because virtually all consulting engagements are projects, and therefore project management is key to staying in business and making a profit. For example, every project you undertake as a consultant requires a proposal, and every proposal requires an estimate of time and cost. Without appropriate project management skills – it’s difficult to write an effective or , no less end up with a satisfied and paying client!
Project management is also a billable, repeatable practice in and of itself.
Project management is often in demand, in many different guises, in a variety of businesses.
What Is Project Management
A project is a series of tasks, which must be completed in a particular sequence over a particular time span to achieve a goal or objective.
Project Management is a management science and discipline – a specific set of skills – focused on:
- Defining the scope and characteristics of a project;
- Determining the requires resources;
- Estimating time and cost to complete;
- Assigning and managing the tasks;
- Supervising task completion;
The primary objective of good project management is to get the project done to specification, on time and within budget.
There are several different components to project management:
- Project Configuration is probably the least understood and most important part of project management. In project configuration, the project manager creates a work breakdown structure (WBS) for the project. The WBS defines and lists all of the key work steps in the project, and the dependencies among the work steps. By dependencies, we mean, the identification of the order in which the tasks must be completed.
- Project Estimation is the assignment of a duration (amount of time) and resource required for each work step in the project.
- Project Scheduling is the spreading of the work steps, based upon the dependencies and resources assigned, over time, and determining the actual completion date of the project.
I will take a break, for a moment, from enumerating the elements of project management, to say that project configuration, estimating and scheduling are very misunderstood concepts in general, in business. In 1979, I developed a course on Project Management for the Millard Fillmore School at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which I taught for three years. Never before had a school in the State University of New York system had a course in project management. When I moved from Buffalo, and stopped teaching the course, it was several years before a project management course was again taught.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that configuration, estimation and scheduling, while seemingly simple tasks on the surface, are governed by a series of scientific and mathematical principles. The number one reason for over-budget projects is poor configuration and estimation. The number one reason for late projects is bad scheduling.
The first key principle that I try to teach is that projects will take a finite amount of time. When you resource a project and lay it out on a calendar, you, your client, or your boss may not like the answer you get – but that does not make it wrong.
The second key principle that I try to teach is that the only way to shorten a project is usually to remove some tasks, which means removing project deliverables or “de-scoping” the project.
The third key principle is that there is a mathematical “optimum” amount of resource that can be applied to a project. Too little resource will slow the project down (in a non-linear, rapidly decelerating fashion). Too much resource has nearly the same effect (governed by the “laws of diminishing returns” that we studied in Economics 101 in college). Yet, these principles are often ignored.
- Program Management, sometimes referred to as Project Administration, is the management of multiple, simultaneous projects which are often interconnected.
- Project Control (sometimes referred to as “project management” (small “pm”) meaning the task of managing the resources on a given project.
The Bottom Line
If you are going to be successful in consulting – especially freelancing – you will need to become proficient in project management.
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