Managing Waterstons delivered projects

Richard Brown

Programme/Project Manager

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Project management is all about applying processes, methods, skills, knowledge and experience to achieve set objectives, to time and to budget. From a small, two-day chance, to months of consulting and development, we’ve done it all. The team of professional consultants have the skills and knowledge to deliver projects inline with our quality standards and project management processes, and have access to elevated support if projects become more complex.

Working with a project manager can help ease the complexity and risk projects bring such as:

Coordinating multiple teams delivering different technical elements to avoid issues and delays
Seeing the bigger picture and understanding the level of change and impact the project will have on the people who use it
Being flexible and creative when implementing new technology.

While managing a project yourself may save costs, can you manage this alongside your business-as-usual responsibilities? Projects can over run a deadline, blow the budget or fail to deliver the expected benefits, so having a dedicated, trained project manager will dramatically reduce the risk of failure.

What are the benefits?

Effective team management: Bringing people together from different specialisms to focus on specific objectives, supporting project development alongside their day jobs and other projects, encouraging communication and establishing strong team spirit.
Structured planning: Dividing a seemingly impossible task into clearly-defined, manageable chunks, allocated to the right person and tracked can seem daunting – that’s where a project manager comes in. It’s their job to ensure the objective is achieved while the team move forward at different speeds, quickly reacting to changes.
Planning mitigations and addressing issues: Bringing in experience and skills, tools and methods to understand dependencies between chunks of work and to manage any risks that may come about in a timely manner.
Communication: Understanding who the project stakeholders are and using a range of communication channels to share the right messages at the right time, avoiding poor communication and the loss of goodwill - never underestimate the amount of time needed for calls, meetings and informal chats!
Allow individuals to focus on what they do best: Without a project manager, technical consultants are required to fill in the gaps as best they can, taking them away from their area of expertise. A PM is able to provide them with support and someone to escalate to when they need more help.

Our approach

Tried and tested: Project Management isn’t rocket science and there has been much written on what can go wrong and how to avoid it. A PM professional has read the books (and possibly contributed to a few), mastered the tools and has the methods at their fingertips to bring a structure and approach that will limit the risk of failure.
More than admin: A good project manager looks at more than ticking boxes and filling in forms – they own the problems, take an active interest in the business outcomes and the people who will make it happen.
Appropriate to the project: we don’t just deliver with waterfall methodologies; our team also has experience in delivering in an agile approach, and can even provide training on these tools and methods.