Project management is a discipline that requires discipline. That second “discipline” means that additional efforts will be required to ensure that the culture, the processes and the project-specific endeavors are performed effectively and efficiently. The consultative role, which we suggest that you, the project manager, must assume, addresses the integration of the project management discipline into the way that you conduct project management in your current business environment.
In this role, you become a mentor and provide a “mentoring” service. It is your job to build in-house processes and expertise with all your project stakeholders. This ensures that you, your project and your organization will enjoy the greatest opportunity for success in your project and process management efforts. In your consultative role, you should take applicable approaches from the project management discipline and organizational sciences and apply proven techniques to improve project and team behaviors, processes and methodologies. In short, your consultative efforts should be structured to maximize the success of projects within your organization.
It is your job to consistently deliver measurable improvements while equipping your project stakeholders with the tools and techniques to achieve change and manage practical project management processes themselves. It is your mission to transfer expert knowledge and skills to members of the project community who are within your sphere of control.
Try to see yourself as an internal consultant, an expert in project management who brings problem solving and analytical skills to your client's environment. You offer comprehensive solutions which may be project process, or people-specific. You do this by mentoring, coaching and managing a crossfunctional team of people or by facilitating hands-on action planning, process and procedure development, intervention and audits on a project-specific basis.
First and foremost, your management wants implementation and tangible results. Rather than a project planner and status report producer, your management is looking for a person with consultative skills who can help integrate project management into the day-to-day fabric of the organization. Companies are looking for help in managing growth, change, and performance. This translates into the client's need for comprehensive implementation assistance.
It will be helpful for you to visualize the client needs that will benefit from the consultative efforts you provide. In your consultative role, deliverables, unlike products such as status reports, are, nonetheless, entities that can be described and evaluated. Figure 1 portrays those deliverables. As you can see, the upper portion of the sphere refers to project-specific efforts. The lower portion of the sphere addresses efforts that would effect the entire enterprise. These enterprise-wide efforts have been broken down into process-related and culture-related interventions.
Project-Specific. The tasks performed in your project-specific consultant's role are very similar to those you are currently performing, but with a different mindset. These tasks might consist of participation in monthly status meetings, facilitation of specific planning or procedural design efforts, or built-in coaching and monitoring. As an internal project management consultant, you review project plans, status reports, and other documents in order to provide process-related assistance. In addition, you work closely with the project team members, providing individualized reinforcement of sound project management principles and can “shadow” your team leads through project meetings.
By using your skills as an internal project management consultant, your company is provided with an objective review that helps the team leads step back from the day-to-day pressures and focus on processes. This is of the greatest benefit to the team leads who also have technical roles, where the interaction with you, the project manager, in your consultative role, enables the team leads to focus on the critical project management issues while maintaining their technical roles. Some of the consultative efforts that you might perform are:
Project Launch: Create a basic project structure and project plan components for a new project. You guide the intact team through the project planning process and produce a project mission statement, map of the project relationships, a team communication strategy, work breakdown structure, task responsibility matrix, project network, and schedule and contingency plans, to name a few of the possible deliverables. At the end of the series of work sessions, you aid the team in outlining a game plan that will address the monitoring, tracking and controlling of the project once it gets under way.
Team Building: Build team effectiveness. As an internal consultant, you work with your project client and individual contributors to build a strong foundation for effective interpersonal communication—a necessary ingredient for any team. This is a highly customized effort. The sessions should be designed using a variety of instruments, exercises and techniques to address specific issues and meet pre-defined objectives. You will need to do some homework before moving into this consultative endeavor by either talking to your human resource training staff or reading some excellent books that contain exercises on team building. Team vision, strategies for communicating during a project, tactics for being accessible and available, team-generated agreements for expected behaviors, a map of interdependencies and roles, and responsibilities and authority issues can all be discussed and resolved. The goal is to increase team effectiveness and cohesiveness so that project goals can be met with a minimum of conflict and organizational disruption. Acting in this consultative role, you can facilitate the behavioral and communication dynamics essential to a team's coalescence.
Figure 1. Consultative Effort Deliverables
Project Midstream Audit: Evaluate existing project plans and project progress reports to identify problem areas and to determine appropriate strategies for refocusing plans and revitalizing the project team. Several months into a major project, team leads and team members may begin to lose interest or focus. This can have a devastating impact on project results. Key problems, issues and roadblocks must be identified and analyzed to determine causes and impacts. The team or individual sub-teams, facilitated by you acting as an internal consultant, can then create action plans, revised project plans and/or contingency plans for making changes, solving problems and removing barriers to progress. People should leave the session(s) with a clear sense of direction, ready to face the project with new vigor and focused energy.
Specific Problem Intervention: Analyze a current problem situation to determine its cause and related impact in order to devise appropriate corrective actions. The project is in trouble. What's causing the problem and what is the appropriate action? Taking on the mindset of an internal consultant, you can assist the relevant players in their analysis of the problem from several perspectives in order to understand the potential solutions and their impacts. Once the problem is thoroughly understood, the group, with you acting as a facilitator, can develop alternatives and choose a recommended solution. The goal is to gain a new perspective on the problem and to devise appropriate corrective actions.
Post-Project Evaluation: Review and evaluate a recently completed project so that lessons learned can be identified as a growth experience for the project team and documented for use by future teams. Everyone working on a project learns and somehow benefits from the experience. But does the organization benefit from what is learned by individual project participants? Often not. This evaluation process ensures that not only do team members assimilate project learnings, but that the information benefits others as well.
The above efforts have focused on the consultative endeavors that address one specific project and one unique project team. There are, however, other concerns that affect the entire organization.
Enterprise-wide Cultural Concerns. Organizational Analysis: Assess project management organizational structures while assessing barriers that prevent implementation of project management. An effective project management strategy requires the appropriate organizational support and an environment conducive to the discipline of project management. You may need to analyze the barriers to project management and recommend changes in organizational structures that will better support a project management environment. You can help ensure that those strategies are reflected in your company's project organizational structures and in how the discipline is communicated effectively throughout the organization.
Human Resources Planning and Development: Find and prepare the right people for the right jobs. In your consultative role, you can manage these critical human resources needs by selection, assessment, and performance management (performance appraisal reviews specifically designed for the project players).
Performance Development: Devise means to orchestrate a learning environment and transfer the learning once people are back on the job. People need to keep developing and growing, learning more about both their technical and their interpersonal roles in project management. This can be done through classroom training, self-study or on-the-job coaching. In this new consultative role, consider it your job to make recommendations and to institute, where you have authority, mechanisms for personal development for your project team members. But what assures that learning is brought back to the job, cultivated and encouraged until it becomes reality and habit? It is also your job to provide a Performance Development–Skills Transfer process to see that these new skills are applied.
Enterprise-wide Process-Related Concerns. Methodology: Creating a project management methodology unique to your organization permits you to reengineer your work processes and the way in which employees approach their jobs. Few companies have escaped the need to rethink their project management strategies and to see that these processes and procedures are correctly documented and disseminated to all the people who engage in project work. You can work with existing off-the-shelf methodologies or build your own to clarify the processes, procedures and methods by which project management work will be done.
Software: Focus exclusively on integrating the tool of your choice into business processes that are already in place in order to maximize the company's investment and the efficiencies that the tool can generate for the organization. Today's project management software has the inherent power to transform data into action plans—and much more. Your ability to take on the role of a consultant provides the bridge that logically links project management methodologies, the learning process and the integration of the tools into the day-to-day work environment. Tactically, you can aid in the customization of your tool to create templates, charts, and reports specific to your needs but standardized for the entire organization. Strategically, you can help evaluate, choose, and implement companion products to enhance the functionality of your chosen tool.
Prioritization Process: Assist your organization in developing and implementing a project solicitation, assessment and prioritization process. Using off-the-shelf project prioritization templates, you, along with a top-level management team, can customize a model to assess the viability of a project. Once viability is established, the project can be assigned priority in relation to other projects in progress. After the prioritization criteria have been defined, a project solicitation evaluation procedure can be developed and disseminated, alerting the project requestor to the method of presentation that will ensure their project proposal receives the most favorable consideration.
The Consulting Process. Whether we're talking about project-specific assignments or enterprise-wide initiatives, as a consultant, you need to work with your designated contact—the team leads, the project client, and the top management committee—to define boundaries and establish goals prior to any work being performed. You may use questionnaires, focus groups, individual interviews, or a combination of these methods.
For the assignment itself, you must involve all the appropriate players in creating, interpreting and validating the deliverables. The outputs are tangible documents, often accompanied by your report, that compare additional findings to generally acceptable project management principles and recommend action steps that should be taken. The outputs of each endeavor are owned by the people involved in the project. You act as a facilitator to see that the effort is accomplished with credibility and integrity.
Your role, as an internal project management consultant, may be simply to identify areas of concern and position the client or the team so that they can move forward with solutions. In other cases, the client or the team may have already identified the issues and have defined specific interventions with which they need facilitation and/or expertise. These assignments may be long-term, as in the development of a project methodology, or short-term, as in the case of a project-specific work session. In either case, it is your job to provide the skills, the talent and the experience to collaborate with the project players, not just in order to recommend solutions, but also to aid in implementing those solutions; to recommend courses of action or creation of structures that the key players can implement. It is your job to take strategies through to action and results.
Benefits of Consultative Project Management. With your entire business in mind and with the extensive involvement of the client's people, if you take a holistic approach to a specific request, you can ensure the greatest opportunity for success in your project, process and people management efforts. This is the only way that the root causes of problems, not just symptoms, can be tackled and substantial improvement institutionalized.
If you have the mindset of an internal project management consultant, you can assure your management that after an assignment the people involved will have the practical ability to better manage projects. In a meeting, for example, your position as a consultant/facilitator allows the team leads or the project client to focus on the discussion rather than on the mechanics of the meeting. They can also observe the techniques that you employ and use them on future projects. You are not just doing the work to get the job done; your objective is to transfer skills and implement practical solutions and processes for future projects and future teams. As a consultant, it is your mission to provide the delivery of timely, responsive services to all your clients.
Your challenge is to acquire the necessary consultative skills to perform this new role of internal project management consultant. You must change your mindset so that you evolve from a tactical problem-solver into a designer and implementor of meaningful changes to your project organization's way of doing business. That is the way to serve your organization, your project, and yourself more effectively.
Joan Knutson is president and founder of Project Mentors, a San Francisco-based project management consulting and training firm.