Avoiding The Costs Of A Full Time Project Manager

Organising key projects requires project management methodology to ensure that projects are delivered on time and within budget. Given that many projects can be successfully managed part-time, how can your organisation avoid the cost of a fully loaded employee? Utilising a contract project manager is the answer.

A contract project manager can work part time and offers the flexibility of employing someone without the risk of employment law.  The contract project manager effectively works for themselves and invoices for their services at the end of each month. They are cheaper then a full time project manager and have the flexibility to work to one day a week and typically without any contractual tie-in.  

A contract project manager typically will not fulfil the actual work of the project, they typically define milestones and constantly manage the profit and loss to ensure the project remains within budget over the complete lifecycle. This means for smaller projects that a full time employee is not necessarily required though project control is. Just because it is a smaller project, doesn’t mean it should not be given the attention, detail and control of a larger project.

Much of the work of a contract project manager is done at the beginning of the project where the project initiation and business case are authored. Their job also includes defining all the risks and to ensure they are monitored and mitigated against.  A project plan is put together with deliverables defined at particular milestones.  Typically the contract project manager will report by exception where they report only to the project board in the event that the project is going to deviate from the approved plan outside of the agreed budget or timescale tolerances.

One such provider of contractual project manager’s is Rain Dance Software Solutions based in Wales. Mark Andrews, Director of Operations explains “Often companies have a requirement for a temporary project manager and then try and retrofit someone else from the company to do the role.  This often ends in failure as they do not have the training and experience with the resulting loss in confidence at the board level.  All our contract project managers are PRINCE2 certified and hugely experienced in a wide range of projects.  The product knowledge of the solution being implemented is not important; contract project management is all about process and responsibility. In fact some of the most successful implementations were done by our people without the product knowledge as they challenge the status quo!”