When Ideas Highway gets the first contact to a potential client, the client’s message sounds like:
“we started simple, it’s been working great, but now we started to take over bigger projects and we feel that the things start getting out of control. We need an expert project manager to help us keep organised.”
But what is exactly the trigger that makes a small business owner to think: “I need an expert project manager” for his/hers startup or medium sized business?
1. Scope creep
This is actually a good sign and a bad consequence. The good part of the scope creep is that it is the first sign that your business took off and is growing. In a small business a scope creep is usually because the client wants more services than initially estimated and is the change to create new products, up-sale, grow your team, start those great project ideas you had. But before you actually start a new project, you have to close out the running projects, mark the scope as achieved and submit the invoice.
We’ll talk about the bad part on part no 3 – Things are messy.
2. Missed deadlines
When it comes to project deadlines and missed deadlines for a small business, from an expert project manager it is split into 2 categories: a clear defined deadline which wasn’t reached, a deadline that was never set. How can you miss a deadline that you never set? A deadline that you never set, is a deadline that you never reached, in consequence is a missed deadline. In whatever your business does, there should be a deadline, a time when you say I’ve done it, is ready, here is the invoice.
3. Things are messy
It is that moment when you wondering who does what? what there is left to be delivered? Do we have the capacity to expand our services with our current team or maybe we need additional resources. This is exactly the trigger your business touches that you know is the moment to hire an expert project manager.