Deliverables of a consultancy projects are different to deliverable of a Development projects, due to the fact that the key deliverables of consultancy projects deliver documentation including recommendation, best practices, assessment reports & findings. Unlike in development projects, most consultancy projects dos not deliver any workable product. Due to this reasons, some of the steps such as complex software coding tasks, Software Quality Assurance (SQA), debugging, implementation & user training are not relevant for consultancy projects. But when doing an IT strategy design, requirement gathering and analysis, high level architecture design, documentation and quality assurance will play a key role in this context.
The challenges we face in managing consultancy projects are very much varied than the other projects due to some of the inherited features of IT consultancy projects.
Following are some of the typical challenges face in managing consultancy projects
• Scope management
• Expectation management
• Stakeholder management
• Cost Management
Below is a brief discussion about Scope Management in the context of consultancy projects.
For any kind of a project, scope management is and important aspect and in cases where there is poor management of scope will most likely to pave way for budget & time overrun. Satisfying different rationalities and expectation of the stakeholders can be difficult. And in most instances the expectation of different stakeholders can be contradictive and sometimes may not be align with project objectives or organizational objectives. Specifically in consultancy projects, it is vital to analyze more than one industry verticals or several business entities together and due to the fact it’s more difficulty to demarcation of the boundary line for the project. When it comes to the BPR (Business Process Re-Engineering) or GPR (Government Process Re-Engineering) related projects, the existing processes and systems can be very vague or sometimes tightly coupled. In such situation, it is important to separate tightly coupled processes to several processes and recognize processes which is relevant to the project scope. But, what will it do for the processes which are beyond our boundary line?. Can we ignore those?. Ignoring is not the best practice to go ahead , what we can do is, provide specification for these processes and emphasizes relationship with processes which are in the project scope. This will help to maximize the efficiency of our project outcome and help in the improvement of future projects.
What will be the situation if we totally ignore such processes from our project scope?. This is one of the reasons for most of the project failures in the implementation stage or after. If we consider a consultancy for ERP implementation project ( e.g. Supply chain management system), what will be the impact of above ignorance. For example, in the supplier management, we don’t take into consideration the impact it can bring to Accounts Receivable system (AR) when a particular supplier becomes customer of the same business. The reason is, usually supply chain management system directly associate with Accounts Payable system (AP), and it will lead not to realize the above special scenario.
By looking at this simple example, we are able to understand the importance of thorough analyzing of project scope, with respect to every process. Even though if it is more likely to be outside of the intended project scope.
Why this factor is much more important in a consultancy project. The reason is, software development & implementation task is wholly depend on the outcome/recommendation of the consultancy project (BPR, GPR or Requirement Analysis)
