Our new article series, The Questions Behind the Questions, takes the questions IT leaders ask us most and follows the logic wherever it leads. No sales pitch, just the thinking.
Part one is below: The Loneliest Number in Your Project Portfolio.
Based on the FAQs: The Questions Behind the Questions: “What is Project Management as a Service?” and “What is the difference between PMaaS and a traditional project manager?”
Here’s a small thought experiment.
Imagine your most important IT project rests on one person. A good person. Experienced, organised, liked by stakeholders.
Now suppose there’s a modest 1 in 20 chance, in any given month, that something takes them out of the picture. A better job offer. Illness. A family emergency. A contract that simply ends.
One in twenty sounds comfortable. But run it over an 18-month programme and the odds that you get through without a single disruption fall to roughly 40%.
In other words, it’s more likely than not that your plan will, at some point, be missing its most important ingredient.
That’s the quiet maths of the single project manager.
The problem isn’t the person. It’s the structure.
Most organisations don’t think of a project manager as a risk. They think of them as the thing that manages risk. Which is true, right up until the moment the knowledge, the relationships and the plan all walk out of the door together.
Engineers have a name for this: a single point of failure. They design it out of bridges, aircraft and data centres. We tend to design it straight into our project teams.
So what’s the alternative?
There are a few, and they all have trade-offs.
You can hire permanently and accept the cost of capacity you don’t always need. You can bring in contractors and accept the churn and the IR35 paperwork. You can stretch an internal lead across three jobs and hope.
Or you can treat project management less like a hire and more like a service.
That’s the idea behind Project Management as a Service (PMaaS). Instead of buying one person, you access a capability: project managers, business analysts and PMO specialists, with governance and oversight sitting behind them. If someone needs to step away, the structure doesn’t step away with them.
At Stoneseed, we’ve run this model since 2009. Our people are directly employed by us, supported by a central PMO, and you use them from one day a week upwards, flexing as your pipeline changes.
A question worth sitting with
If your lead project manager rang tomorrow and said they were leaving, how much of your programme would leave with them?
If the honest answer is “more than I’d like”, it might be worth a conversation. Not a pitch. Just a look at where your single points of failure are, and whether there’s a sturdier way to build around them.
Fancy a conversation? Tell us where your single points of failure are. No sales pitch, just a chat with people who’ve seen it before.
Found this useful? Share it with a colleague whose programme rests on one pair of shoulders, and follow Stoneseed for the next instalment of The Questions Behind the Questions.