Management for Consulting Project Success: 5 Keys

What is a consulting project manager?

A consulting project manager works with internal and external clients to devise and execute strategies related to process or performance enhancement. Decision-makers seeking to recognize potential waste and inefficiency in workflow and processes will find them to be valuable resources.

5 Keys to Successfully Managing Consulting Projects

As a consultant, you’re often managing projects. Much of your consulting success depends on your clients' success, learn the 5 keys to making your consulting projects successful:

1. Keep stakeholders informed
2. Manage expectations with transparency
3. Clearly define your project's scope
4. Track everything
5. Make sure you have the right people on board (beforehand)

1. Keep Stakeholders Informed

Whether it’s through reports, regular communication, or something like a client portal, a crucial element to a successful project is making sure your stakeholders are informed—always. That way, there are no surprises.

2. Manage Expectations With Transparency

When stakeholders can see how much work is left, what’s been worked on, or the overall status of a project, managing expectations is more feasible. Consultants often use things like email to communicate a project’s status and manage expectations, but that’s not ideal. Email has a lack of transparency and collaboration capabilities—using something that provides a more responsive and higher quality service to clients would be a better option.

3. Clearly Define your Project’s Scope

Make sure to quantify deliverables when you can and try to define them in a measurable way. Then, map out how each deliverable or milestone will affect your project’s scope. Since scope creep manages to find its way into even the best-planned projects, make a point to reflect whatever changes occur as the project progresses into the actual project plan (so that you can compare them against the baseline).

4. Track everything

Less than a third of professionals like consultants are tracking their budgets properly, with no timesheet information connected to or included in their collaboration software. This indicates that you might be spending a lot of time manually trying to reconcile progress through meetings, or even worse, you’re not tracking progress at all. Rule to go by if you’re not tracking it, you can’t ensure (or measure) it’s success. Learn more about time tracking solutions for consultants.

5. Make Sure You Have the Right People Onboard (Beforehand).

Part of planning for success means making sure you have the right project team with the right skills working on the right tasks. Make sure you’re matching the project’s scope and the different assignments to each person’s skillset and vice-versa. That kind of proactive planning is also easier when you have one centralized system that lets everyone know who is working on what and when.

Conclusion

If you’d like to see how a consulting company like yours successfully doubled their business while doing these five things (with the help of smart technology), have a look at our case study with Prophix, an IT company, to see how they found success.

Prophix, an IT consulting company