Interim Project Management

Project management is a highly specialist field. Organisations have known for a long time that they can ill afford to not bring projects (and programmes of multiple projects) in on-time, on-quality and on-budget.

Best practise programme and project management is a much broader issue than a few Gantt charts or perhaps some project management software. The PRINCE 2 project management methodology for example, specifies every aspect of a generic project process from initiation to closure, and successful project management depends equally upon the use of appropriate organisational structures.

In some cases this means full-time project managers supported by a programme management office which facilitates the formal coordinated management of multiple projects (and project managers), ensuring that scarce resources are applied appropriately to deliver maximum benefit across the organisation at any one time.

The organisational structures and systems/procedures of project management can be applied to any application where either timing, quality and/or price are critical differentiators. So interim project management is likely to be an occasional requirement for any industry where there are new product introductions, change Programmes or post merger/acquisition integrations that need to be delivered professionally. However, the benefits of formal project management processes and organisational structures remain surprisingly new to some industries.

Naturally, other parts of the economy have learned these lessons earlier. Formal project management has always been critically important for the design and manufacture of large capital projects such as oil and gas rigs and more recently the development of complex software applications, and in these industries the adoption of interim project management services to supplement in-house resources is well understood.

Because of its specialist nature, and the way in which organisations need to deliver change at an ever increasing pace with fewer full-time resources, the use of interim project management services has become particularly valuable when internal expertise is stretched to the limit.

With specific regard to supply chains, the provision of interim project management services can be a crucial component for the delivery of high-value/high-risk supply chain change programmes; post-merger/acquisition integrations, supply chain re-engineering programmes, complex purchasing programmes, logistics network and mode optimisation programmes etc. and as such Executive Interims also provides clients with interim project management and interim programme management services.

Executive Interims - Supply Chain Practise is a specialist provider of supply chain interim management and consulting services.