What if there were a better route to maturity? What if there were a better balance to bringing in a consultant — one where the consultant isn’t auditing the team to “fix” the project, or an implementor the project team needs to direct for all inputs and outputs? What if an organization could hire a consultant who would learn the team, processes and data to develop an implementation plan and path forward?
These goals can be accomplished with an integrator consultant — one person or an elite team that can support your struggling project while identifying key areas of improvement to advance the project maturity of your organization. An integrator, as opposed to an implementor, provides a balanced solution for a struggling project. This team has practical application experience in the world of projects. System agnostic, it is not tied to a particular software or tool but is a specialized team with program management best practice experience under its belt to tailor the solution to the project and organization’s needs.
Adding an integrator team to a struggling project is like onboarding a new hire. The project team will require time to educate the consultant similar to when any other new team member is added to the project. This creates a parallel team working with the same data sets to develop a detailed recommendation of what immediate changes can be implemented and dovetail this into a longer-term initiative to improve project maturity. The project team, while struggling, can still focus on project execution, but it need not stop everything and jeopardize the project even further. The team additions have access to all the same data as the project team, they attend all the same meetings, and there may be immediate recommendations to improve project reporting that can be tackled by the consultant, the project team or a collaboration of both. In this way, the project gains immediate insight from the consulting team as the consultants work in parallel with the project data for a detailed analysis of long-term deliverables.
An integrator’s objectives, beyond the immediate outcome of the current project, include moving the organization forward in the maturity model for current and future projects. An elite team comes with deep technical knowledge of project and program management experience, industry standards, and various systems and software experience to tailor the solution to the organization’s current and desired state.
Regardless of industry, if a core business isn’t executing projects and implementing project management methodologies, a safe option is to look to an organization that excels in project execution and project controls. The ideal partner won’t be unduly influenced by internal and legacy information and understands the organization’s current maturity, what level of maturity is reasonable for the project size, complexity and duration, and what specific steps are required to get there.
Once an approved plan is in motion for maturity improvement in project execution, the organization understands the implementation timeline. Completing the deliverables, however, does not immediately increase the maturity score — implementing new software or processes merely sets the foundation for improved maturity. After implementing the improvement deliverables, the organization then requires run-time with the techniques and tools to see that the outcomes meet the stakeholders’ expectations. Thus, a period of continual improvement ensues, optimizing the solution.