Contracting with a traditional IT staffing agency is often not enough to meet the customized demands of most IT projects. If you’ve had a lackluster experience with an IT staffing agency – you’re not alone. Dealing with inexperienced temporary hires creates frustration, project delays, and ultimately adds to the project’s bottom line. These frustrations are one of the reasons why our clients come to Darby Consulting. They’ve had to learn the hard way about the difference between staffing an IT department with temporary hires and providing highly-trained, often highly-specialized consultants to take charge and lead IT projects to success.
If you’re considering a large IT project, you’ve likely considered the extra burden that will be placed on your existing IT staff and if it makes more sense to temporarily outsource additional staff for the duration of the project. For some projects, outsourcing IT staff is not only smart, but can save your company millions.
When taking on a new informational technology project, an IT project management company is planning ahead for the eventual “go live” event. Depending on the project, that event can be a series of of days or weeks leading to 100 percent implementation of the new software or hardware, or it can all culminate on one day, set at a particular hour. The complexity of these IT projects can vary, but a few elements should always be given importance to guarantee “go live” success.
When starting the initial planning process of any IT project, it’s common for IT project management professionals to list out the potential risks associated with the project and weight them against the potential benefits. However, it takes an experienced, PMI-Certified IT Project Manager to intuitively understand the common pitfalls of IT projects and how best to avoid them.
Most IT projects hinge success or failure on how the following questions are answered. Was the project delivered on-time? Did the project stay on-budget or come under budget? Did implementation run smoothly? Was the new technology adapted easily by our employees? Hiring a consultant firm that specializes in IT Project Management can help turn these answers from ‘no’ or ‘not quite’ to ‘YES.’
From developing project schedules and budgets to monitoring risks and issues, contracting with an IT Project Manager enables you to either hand the project over entirely and focus on your day-to-day operations, or hand off pieces of a large and complex project that is outside of your organization’s wheelhouse.