Engaging a Consultant or Project Manager

Which is best for your business?

 

For a business owner, engaging a Consultant or choosing a Project Manager to help your business can be a daunting process, especially if you are doing it for the first time.

What can you expect from a Consultant?

Is a Consultant the best solution?

Is the Consultant a good match for the business?

Would appointing a Project Manager be a better decision?

So how do you answer all these questions? Let’s take the points one at a time.

 

Engaging a Consultant

One clue is in the title Consultant. You are inviting someone into the business to consult on topics in which you have minimal experience. A Consultant will consult, i.e., provide advice. If you don’t act on the advice you will gain very little. Also, this does mean you’re just receiving advice. As a result, there need to be resources within the business with time available to action the advice together with someone to manage them. Obviously, if you don’t have any spare resources it will create a further problem. It suggests that perhaps you don’t actually need a Consultant, what you really need is a Project Manager to physically be there to manage staff and implement the required actions.

Having clarified the definition of a Consultant, the match of a Consultant to the business is not so much of an issue. It’s more a question of you and the Consultant being a good match. If you don’t get along with the Consultant then it won’t work! You’re engaging someone to provide advice. You may not like the advice but sometimes it’s useful to gain other perspectives and opinions. Don’t forget, Consultants often visit many businesses in a year. They see both good and bad practice. As a business owner, it is debatable whether you have that opportunity – so this is your chance to gain from their experience.

 

Choosing a Project Manager

If you are engaging someone as a Project Manager, then working with the team is an important factor to be considered. You don’t want to alienate your workforce, so how a Project Manager interacts with your staff is vitally important. If you engage a Project Manager you want to maximise their input. You, therefore, need to make it clear to your staff that the Project Manager has your full backing and acts with your authority. You will, of course, need to set aside time to have briefing sessions with your Project Manager to understand how the project is progressing and what, if anything, maybe impacting progress.

The team at P+P are very experienced in providing both Consultancy and Project Management. We cover the following standards ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2105, ISO 27001:2017 and ISO 45001:2018. We’re often involved in audits by the main Certification Bodies, so we know what’s required. We cover East Anglia and our team are strategically located around the main business hubs of Norwich, Great Yarmouth, Kings Lynn, Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich.