The profitable world of project management

A colleague asked me the other day: “Who profits from project management?” It’s an interesting question, not least because I’ve always thought of project management as a cost center rather than a sustainable profitable business. The PMP and PRINCE2 have gone a long way in highlighting the function of project management and putting it on par with other professional skills like accounting, marketing and operations. Consulting, training and software developers have profited from this new found recognition.

Consulting

I’ve always thought of this industry as highly skilled temp workers. Project management consulting has always been an important component in a consulting project. Nowadays it is becoming more common to see project management as a stand alone service offered by consulting companies. Of course industry and technical knowledge still plays an important role as part of the value proposition, however that is no longer always a requirement. Where in the past, I only saw the term ‘best-of-breed’ associated with software products; I am now beginning to hear that in project management consulting pitches too. The idea is to bring in consultants with specific knowledge in project management, and then fill in the rest of the team with specialists required to execute the project.

This is one part of the service industry that is growing rapidly. A high touch business that requires a lot of face time with clients and prospects, low fixed costs and high variable costs, makes it almost impossible to scale profitability.

Training

All you have to do is type in ‘project management training’ in your favorite search engine and you would be barraged with all types of providers. You can get your training served online or offline, in class or via books and CDs, in a university or an independent course provider and in any geography, language and budget you are in. Like consulting, project management training courses have flourished in the last ten years.

I believe this is more a function of demand from students and industry. This has led to the number of inexperienced but trained ‘project managers’ to rise significantly. Whether this would eventually degrade the value of certifications is doubtful. I have been involved in recruiting in more than one organization. Although not a representative sample, I can tell you that project management certifications would get your resume on to the short list.

Software

I’ve seen a lot of products and heard many vendor presentations relating to project management software. I am not a big fan of project management software preferring pencil and paper and then capturing everything in MS Project. However, project management software has been on the rise. Although integration and flexibility issues have given some pause to buyers, the main advantage of project management software is to facilitate a standard method of running a project across an organization. Depending on an organization’s prior experience in managing projects and how tuned the software is to the projects the organization is running, there could be immediate value to using project management software.