Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers!

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Today we’re going to talk about what to look for when hiring a PMO or project management consultant. We’re going to talk about ways that you can leverage consultants to help you with your PMO and what to look for to make sure that you don’t fall into some of the common traps that many organizations fall into. I’ll be giving you a set of key tips to help ensure that the relationship with a consultant is set up for success from the beginning.

Last week in In episode 026, I shared with you a lot of the risks that come from completely outsourcing your PMO. A lot of organizations trend towards trying to find ways to outsource parts of the organization that are not critical to the success of their organization. Often this is administrative functions, they feel that they can outsource these for economical reasons or because the organization just doesn’t have the internal capability.

I also talked all about why you need to be super careful with outsourcing and ways that you can make a partially outsourced model work so that you retain control. You must keep the relationships, you maintain internal accountability, and you don’t create that “us and them” culture that can easily spring up when you outsource a function.

Let’s dig in. I know how hard it can be to know where to start when you’re tasked with building, running, rescuing, optimizing your PMO or your project management practice in an organization. Many people will turn to consultants and for good reason because they’re experts at this, right?

Well, maybe…it depends on who you hire. How do you know you are making the right investment and that this company that you bring in, that you’re trusting to help you, to go on this journey with you, will be the right one to partner with as you’re building or evolving your PMO or project management practices?

I know a thing or two about this. When I was inside organizations in the role of PMO leader, I often brought in external partners to help me figure it out. When I built my first PMO back in 1999 I really had no idea where to start and we actually didn’t know of any consulting firms that did this kind of work. I figured a lot of it out the hard way and made my fair share of mistakes and also learned a ton later on in other PMOs that I was setting up.

We had some room for some consultants. We had some room for bringing in people that could help us and sometimes it went really well and sometimes not so well. And I’ll share with you a few examples, some things to look out for and some of the experiences that I had when bringing in external consultants to help me build and run PMOs.

I also now do have a consulting practice. I’ve also been on the other side of this fence. You see, I’ve had my company PMO strategies, which does have a consulting line of business that we’ve been running for about the last seven years. And I have a very different approach in my consulting practice to what you’ll typically see out there. So I can share some insights on why I have this different approach and frankly it flies in the face of what a lot of consulting organizations are trying to do, but I get results.

A Note to My Fellow Consultants:

If you are a PMO or project management consultant, listen in, I got your back too, trust me on this. If you listen to this guidance and understand that I’m sharing this information with the people that will be hiring you in the organization. Telling them what they should be looking for. If you work with your clients in this way, everybody wins. It is a 100% win-win situation. When you are solving their business problems and you are helping them achieve their goals, they will find more ways to work with you because you have become a trusted advisor to them and they will refer you like crazy. In fact, my business has been 100% credibility and referral based.

Our consulting practice is not widely advertised because it doesn’t have to be. We have tons of business coming our way from referrals because people know we are the experts in the PMO space and our clients are happy and get fantastic results and therefore they refer us to other clients. So if you are a consultant listening, let me help you make a bigger impact in your consulting practice.

Advice for Hiring a Consultant

If you are looking to hire a PMO or project management consulting firm, follow this advice and these tips to make sure that that experience hits it out of the park. You do get a trusted advisor helping you and you walk away with exactly what you need to earn that seat at the strategy table, maintain that seat at the table, and make a bigger impact helping your organization deliver on their strategy.

Things to look for in a PMO Consultant

Okay, so here are the things to look for when you are hiring a consulting firm to help you.

Beware of the cookie-cutter approach. A good consulting firm that does this type of work regularly should be able to talk to you about the system they follow to successfully support you in building or evolving your internal PMO and PM capability. That’s very different than having a cookie-cutter implementation approach that they just rinse and repeat.

In every client organization, I’ve seen this problem. I’ve seen this so many times when I was on the inside building and running PMOs, consulting firms would come in and just plop down the same thing they just did for another company without any regard for if it would work for us. It always ended up being a total disaster or we’d spent months and months reorganizing, repackaging, or redoing what they came in to do. Some times this was a really expensive endeavor.

Sometimes I wouldn’t actually be responsible for bringing in the firm. But then once they were there and I’d see the checks that they were getting cut, I would be blown away because I knew that this was literally a rinse and repeat. How did I know? I watched them just changing the customer name on all of the resources and using the exact same templates and, and framework.

What you want to be looking for is an organization that has a good approach and a framework for taking you on that PMO development and evolution journey. But the framework includes a step by step process for learning the organization, assessing the organization for impact opportunities, and then building something that suits the needs of your organization that suits the pain points that you have identified.

A lot of consultants will joke that every organization is the same and every organization has the same problems. But every organization will tell you that they’re all different.

Here are my thoughts on that. There are a finite set of business problems and there are a finite set of pain points, but you’ve gotta be looking for the nuance. When an organization says, “well we’re different,” it might be that simply speak a different language. For example, a financial services organization and the culture of that organization could be very different than an organization that is a nonprofit.

One of my PMOs in the past was a very hard-charging investments focused kind of a function, but it operated in a very, very collaborative type of culture. If you mistakenly said, “well this is a hard-charging financial service investment function”, you would have missed the nuance of the way that culture operated.

The same can go for a nonprofit organization. I worked in a very big nonprofit organization before helping them bring about change and implement better change management practices and they were very, very collaborative. But make no mistake, you still had to deliver results. So we don’t want to make assumptions about the culture or say that it’s a one size fits all. Or if we’re working with this type of organization, this is what you’re going to experience. There is some nuance there and a good consulting organization will understand and learn how to uncover that nuance.

On the other side, keep in mind that this problem set is still all about people, which means you are going to run into a lot of the same kind of people problems. For example, I will talk a lot about organizational change management in future episodes and frankly, it is threaded throughout almost everything that I teach because it does apply to everyone. Organizational change management and the need to bring people with you through the change process is common to every change you’re trying to create regardless of being in one type of organization or another. However, the nuances there are what you need to pay attention to.
Think about how the consulting organization that you’re thinking about outsourcing things to help you with your PMO needs. How do they address the nuance?

Look for proven experience.

The second thing I would recommend that you think about and focus on when you’re looking to hire PMO or PM consultants is insisting that they have proven experience doing what you’re trying to do.

One of the common ways that consulting firms get bigger is by bringing in newer staff to learn the ropes. During the sales process, they will introduce you to the experts with the knowledge and the expertise to help you successfully implement the changes you’re trying to make. Then after the contract is signed, the actual boots on the ground, are staff that actually haven’t done this before or they only know how to follow that cookie-cutter approach that you really don’t want in your organization.

You will need people that can think on their feet and break outside of the process or checklist that they’re supposed to follow and help you actually solve your business problems in your organization.

Assess similar challenges.

And that leads me to number three, which is to ask them about similar challenges. Make sure that you asked them about how they have done what you were trying to do.

If they are there to help you rescue your PMO, they should be able to give you examples and tell you stories of where they had to rescue PMO that was failing. Get specific on what they did in that organization to get things back on track and if you get surface-level answers, just simply say, tell me more about that.

Ask them to tell you about things they wished they would have done differently. That’s an important one because a rescue scenario, for example, is so painful and emotional and hard to do and there are going to have some lessons learned. If they don’t have some lessons from prior experience that has shaped how they provide services now, this should be a red flag.

These are good points that will help you determine if this firm is willing to be honest with you and that they make a conscious effort to learn from mistakes and continue to improve.

Look for those stories and look for those details to help you uncover whether or not this firm really has experience with the same kind of pain points and challenges that you’re experiencing.

Maintain control to maintain strategic alignment.

Number four, you still need to run the show. It’s absolutely okay to leverage consultants to help you by providing industry perspective, but you must still run the show when you turn things over to the consultants completely.

You could risk them taking the team in a direction that is not in alignment with your overall strategy. We’re in alignment with the culture of your organization. You also run the risk that everything falls apart the minute they leave. Great consultants can help you put systems and processes in place to ensure continued evolution and statement for your PMO. Last week’s episode, dove deeply into the reasons you shouldn’t fully outsource your PMO, so make sure you check that episode out for more risks that you want to avoid in that process.

Leverage consultants as your voice.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re an employee inside an organization and you say something or you have this great idea and you share it with people, it doesn’t seem to carry as much weight as the highly paid consultant that your executives brought in?

Do you know what I’m talking about? If you’ve ever brought a consultant in and you’re thinking to yourself, I just told you that exact same thing, but you didn’t listen to me and now you’re paying this other company so much money to tell you what I already told you. This used to drive me absolutely crazy until I learned how to leverage this to my advantage.

You see, instead of fighting that natural human tendency to place the highest value on what you’ve paid the most for, why not let it work for your advantage? Once your executives have embraced this consulting company and written that big check to get their help inside your organization, they need it to work. They need that consultant to be right because when that consultant is right, that consultant is justifying that they made a good choice and therefore they’re a good leader and therefore they know how to get things done in their organization.

Many times these consultants are great and they’re saying exactly what needs to get said and that’s great. It’s wonderful and it supports the executive that brought them in when they’re right. So people are going to be looking for ways for them to be right, especially if they are the one that wrote the check or made the final call to bring in the consultant.

One time I was working in an organization and I was at the executive level in the organization and I was brought in specifically because of my expertise in helping organizations build and run PMOs and plan and execute big transformational strategy in their organizations. At the same time, they hired a very large, very well known consulting company to come in and advise them on doing the exact same things they brought me in to do. But you see the minute I became an employee, what I had to say didn’t carry as much weight as the consultants that they were paying very big price tags too, regardless of being in the top ranks of the organization.

So here’s what I did. I got to know the consultants, I got to know what their goals were, what they were trying to accomplish, and I gave them a ton of insight into what our CEO was thinking, what our C suite executives were thinking, what we were trying to accomplish in the organization. Once I realized that the consultants and I were in sync with our goals, I would bring them into my office and talk about the outcomes I was looking to achieve and the messaging that the executives needed to hear.

By the time we’d walk into the meetings with the C suite executives, we were perfectly in sync and the consultants heard, “wow, that’s a great idea,” and I got what I wanted, which was the ultimate solution to move us all forward. The caveat is, in order to do this, I had to listen to them say, “Wow, what a great idea” to all of my ideas to the consultants instead of me.

This is a beautiful strategy that works really well, but you’re going to have to check your ego at the door. If you have to be right or if you have to get the credit, and that is your goal. This strategy won’t work, but you also won’t be as effective as you could be if you can get everyone singing the same tune and everyone talking about the strategy that you want to get delivered.

It’s not about credit, it’s about outcomes and doing what it takes to get to those outcomes. The consultants got their big checks and I got an organization that was moving in the direction I knew was going to help us achieve our goals. They win and you win, but again, you’re going to really have to think about what matters to you.

Are you more interested in the output? In being right or wrong? Or in the outcome, achieving the strategic objectives you have for your PMO and for the transformation work you’re trying to do in your organization?

Be patient, take your time, leverage the consultants to be your voice, and you will get where you’re trying to go in the long run.

Another way you can use a consultant is a way that many of my students and clients have used me in their organizations and that is to also be the voice of the PMO leader to the executive and the executive to the PMO leader. Most of the time I’m hired by the CEO of an organization to come in and help establish PMO and project management practices and help to build out that PMO that needs to be built for the organization and all that goes with it.

I understand executive speak, so many times I spend my time helping the PMO leader and the other stakeholders in the organization understand what the executive is trying to articulate, communicate, and what they need in place in order to move the organization strategy forward.

I also speak PMO and project manager and so I know how to help the executives understand what they can do to support the PMO, their role as a sponsor, their role as a champion for the PMO and for project management in the organization. Many times when I go into these consulting engagements, I spend just as much time with the executive as I do with the PMO leader, sharing with the executive how they can support and move their organization forward more effectively. Many times they don’t really understand that there’s that gap there and what they could be doing to support the organization.

In fact, one of my favorite clients said to me after we had been working together for a while, he said, “you know, I used to be a terrible sponsor. I had no idea what was expected of me and how I could support my organization more effectively. And now I know and it’s that simple, right?”

So you can use a consultant to help open the eyes of your stakeholders, help them understand how they can engage more effectively, open the eyes of your executives and help them understand what you need as a PMO leader. And then as an executive, you can use a consultant to translate into PMO and project management, speak what you’re trying to say and how you need to be supported to move the organization strategy forward.

Learn to Fish.

Any consulting organization that you bring in, make sure they teach you how to fish. Good consultants can show you what to do. Great consultants will make sure you can stand on your own when they leave. It is a policy in our company PMO strategies that we build in capability development of internal staff into every single engagement that we do. Our business is built entirely on referrals and reputation, which means that we will only be successful if our clients are not only happy with us while we are there, but also long after we are gone.

Make sure that you build capability development of your internal staff into any consulting contract that you have and then ensure that key resources are partnered with any consultant staff to watch and learn from them. Consultants that come in and that you partner up with your internal staff need to be more senior folks that have learned to coach and develop people so that they can explain not only what they’re doing but why they’re doing it, how they’re doing it and why it is so important that it be done in that way.

As I talked about in the last episode around why you shouldn’t outsource your PMO. I believe it is truly important that for so many reasons, the PMO has a very internally led and internally focused makeup and it doesn’t have to be all internally sourced, but you’ve got to make sure that you are not outsourcing the entire PMO, especially the leadership of the PMO because that accountability and authority and all the things we talked about in the last episode are critical to the success of the sustainability of the PMO and making sure that it continues to thrive long after that consultant or consulting company is gone.

Leverage industry expertise.

One last way that you can leverage consultants to help you build and run your PMO. Make sure you leverage them for their industry expertise. You want to know what the best in your industry is doing in terms of PMO and project management capability.

Leverage a consulting firm that keeps their ear to the ground on what is going on or what works with clients in the same industry. If you’ve got a consultant that has seen this movie before, they can tell you all about the pitfalls that you need to avoid as well as the tried and true techniques that have worked in similar organizations.

I talk a lot about making sure that any consulting company you work with has done this before, can tell you stories about other clients they’ve helped with very similar problems, and can really act as a set of guard rails for you as you’re going along your PMO journey. They should have the expertise to guide you, or correct you, or give you a chance to kind of see a way that you can move the organization forward with the things you’re trying to create without having to reinvent the wheel.

I hope this list has given you some things to think about as you go on this journey of building and running your PMO and thinking about the different ways that you can leverage a consulting practice for good and not evil to help you set up and run your PMO.

Just remember, you’ve got to maintain control of this PMO, you have got to make sure that this is a PMO that belongs to the organization, not the consulting company that you’ve hired. There are so many ways that you can leverage a consultant to help you along this journey, give you knowledge, give you expertise, and maybe most importantly, teach your organization how to fish so that you can build and run a sustainable PMO that will continue to provide value and support and high impact to your organization for years to come.