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Hiring a Freelance Project Manager

Why and when to hire a freelance Project Manager?

The Project Manager Role is one that transcends Industries / Verticals and is a welcome addition to any. Whether a telecommunication company, a petrochemical, IT, construction etc… work will always have a business as usual (BAU) aspect and a project (new initiatives) one.

Driving value through simplicity and customer centrism

The Expert in Project Management is the one that will take lead of that project and balance his work on the thin line between technical (the specific knowledge repositories and “hard” details of the company’s focus) and strategy, direction, planning and striving ahead in an area where the company didn’t have any (or very little) expertise before the said project.

A Project Manager will never have more “factual” or technical knowledge than the local experts but will be able to bring together to the “table” all the stakeholders that are/should be involved in the new project, ensuring that everyone understands the end deliverable and what their role is in reaching that deliverable. The Project Manager will ensure that a standard “language” is spoken across the Project Team, he will identify the clear scope of the project, split the timeline into smaller deliverables and assign responsibilities and tasks within the team.

A Project Manager is the professional that can easily walk the fine line between technical work and strategy, between numbers and people, and that can act as a translator for each of the specialized stakeholders, while ensuring that the clear scope and deliverables are understood and fulfilled within the very strict deadline

A Project Manager is a person who is responsible for making decisions, both large and small. The project manager should make sure they control risk and minimise uncertainty. Every decision the project manager makes must directly benefit their project.

In short, the Project Manager will manage the project from beginning to end, as if managing a “start-up”, ensuring that the right people, resources and expectations are part of the project. At the end of the project, the new initiative will become part of the BAU and therefore fall outside of the scope of the Project Manager, which will ensure a smooth “transition” of the “former” project within the organization, including identifying the owner / responsible and all the stakeholders, as well as mapping the required processes.

If we look at a new project as an “internal start-up” the PM will be the interim CEO of the start-up.

The project manager must have a combination of skills including an ability to ask penetrating questions, detect unstated assumptions and resolve conflicts, as well as more general management skills.

The need to hire / use a focused PM does not seem so clear in the beginning, but once we understand that an individual that can combine the technical skills required for the specific project with the People Skills that are mandatory in steering a cross-functional team towards a new scope, a new deliverable, is randomly present in an organization, the need is obvious and necessary, as more and more companies undertake Project based changes inside their own organizations.

Find and hire trusted freelance project managers in a very simple and agile way through Outvise.

Certified Project managers in the Network

case study
Project Management case study for a Telecommunications company

Challenge, Context, Problems to be solved

A telecom operator in South Africa wanted to understand if its channels across Sub-Saharan Africa are enough for achieving the targets for the next few years.

Mission, tools and methodology

  • Assessed the current status / pipeline of channels across South Africa and 6 other focus markets in the Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Undertook benchmarking exercises across similar Telecom operators across the world in order to understand the Golden Standard in ratios / types of channels / customer segmentation in the SME and Large Enterprise environment
  • In-depth interviews and workshops with all the involved stakeholders from all 7 Countries involved in the exercise in order to understand all the bottlenecks / issues that might arise on a local level.
  • Evaluated the maximum impact achievable with the current channel status and “created” the ? to the desired targets.
  • Modeled the future channel requirements per country per segment, following a standardized customer segmentation for each country.

Achieved results

Undertook a flash 10 week assignment in which were successfully modeled the required channels per country per Business segment, to FTE level, that will drive the required targets in the next 36 months, with an expected CAGR of 20%.

South Africa

Must have skills for a Project Manager

A Jack of all trades that knows which buttons to push in order to move the team ahead:

  • Proficiency in Business-case building.
  • Strong presentation skills.
  • Social / people / leadership abilities.
  • KPI steering.
  • Results oriented.
  • Organized and able to organize others.
  • Fast decision maker.
  • Able to identify risks early in the process and address / mitigate them.
  • Ability of bringing together and steering multi-cultural and cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities of the role:

  • Planning and defining scope.
  • Activity planning and sequencing.
  • Resource planning.
  • Cost estimating.
  • Developing a budget.
  • Risk analysis.
  • Managing risks and issues.
  • Monitoring and reporting progress.
  • Team leadership.
  • Strategic influencing.
  • Business management.
  • Business partnering.
  • Working with vendors.
  • Project delivery to end-user as BAU.