Mid-sized to large companies and government organizations know very well that their IT staff are often ill-equipped to handle all new technology initiatives, especially according to the executive leadership's ambitious timetables.
Simply put, many IT projects fall outside the expertise of the people on the technology staff, which could divert internal IT staff members from performing their jobs adequately.
A catastrophic result of not outsourcing new IT solution initiatives is an inefficient organizational IT infrastructure.
As a business leader, you can't allow this to happen and expect to maintain continuous business operations, at least from an IT perspective. This requires a solid partner with the right project management approach.
Project Management: Managing an Outside Project Within Your Organization
When you decide to work with an outside firm on one or more IT solutions projects, there has to be a central contact--a project manager--within your organization. This person will serve as the gatekeeper for most communications with project developers in the external firm. This gatekeeper ensures that the developers understand how the project in question will achieve a specific strategy and how all parts of the project interact with each other.
The project manager will also assist with managing all deadlines, including issuing reminders to the people within the organization who must collaborate with project developers. This is a benefit of working with an IT solutions firm to complete projects, as they always have an eye on maximizing the business relationship with the external technology provider. Your organization should choose a firm with a proven ability to examine all interactions within a project and not to allow aspects of a project to occur in isolation.
Project Management: How Your IT Solutions Provider Manages Your Project Tasks
In the end, IT solutions providers, such as 5x Technology, that assume projects from mid-sized to large companies and government organizations get paid to complete their projects on schedule. While there is a mechanism in a typical contract for a missed deadline, developers usually must finish their development efforts on time. When you engage an outside IT solutions provider, you want this outside project support to include a systematic approach to managing the tasks, such as a project management dashboard.
Without a systematic process for managing all the tasks for the project--including those tasks assigned to your company internally and those to be completed by the IT solutions provider--a breakdown in communication can occur on either side. When this breakdown happens, the project will not only be inefficient, but will be less likely to meet your deadline for completion.
Additional obstacles arise when project contributors do not complete their respective tasks on time, especially if those tasks are required to be completed in order for another task to be completed, or quite often, even started. A designated project management dashboard will keep contingent tasks assigned and allow both your internal project manager and the external provider to not only keep all contributors on task, but to quickly identify and resolve any issues and keep the project on schedule.
You want a solutions provider that can provide a project management approach that keeps all tasks moving, on schedule and allows the project to be delivered by the deadline.
Preventing Trouble in the Process
The key to successful project management is for the client and the IT solutions provider to sit down and agree on the specifics of the project and how those will help the client attain certain objectives. The specific scope and plan for the project is easy using project management software. The project manager assigns specific tasks to people and tracks when each task is completed. If different project contributors act in isolation, they cannot understand how their task relates to the final product or to other parts of the project.
Trusting Us With Your IT Solutions Needs
We are committed to helping client organizations get the most out of their IT solutions projects by using transparency in the scheduling of work and implementation of each project stage. Working with an agile approach to software development, we use different strategies to ensure that our team works with a high level of coordination and speed. For example, we use paired programming, which partners senior developers with junior developers, and quickly builds our capacity over the course of your project. We also pull developers from other projects to assist as needed when we need to work out the bugs in your project. We know that failure to communicate or complete specific tasks on time will not help your organization successfully implement your goals when our work is done. Helping your organization attain your goals for an IT project is very important to us.
For more details on successful project management, we hope you will contact us.
Related: What is Intelligent Project Management Methodology?
