Or: Why Your IT Project Deserves Better Than a Drive-By Installation
You’ve got an IT project. Maybe it’s a telephony upgrade, a data centre migration, or one of those digital transformation initiatives that’s been “starting next quarter” for the past three quarters. The question is: who’s going to manage it?
The traditional answer has been straightforward: hire a contractor or accept whoever the vendor sends with their shiny new kit. But like most things in IT, the reality is more nuanced than that. Let’s explore what you’re actually getting with each option.
The Contractor PM: The Hired Gun
Contractors are the special forces of project management. They parachute in, bring their own arsenal of tools and templates, and can often hit the ground running faster than you can say “resource allocation matrix.”
What works: They’ve genuinely seen it all before. That problem you’re losing sleep over? They’ve solved it three times already. They bring fresh perspective, proven methodologies, and usually a healthy disregard for “but we’ve always done it this way.”
What doesn’t: Their commitment has a literal expiry date. When things get complicated (and they always do), you might find yourself renegotiating terms or watching them quietly update their LinkedIn profile. Knowledge transfer? It happens, but that brilliant workaround they created often lives only in their head. When they leave, it leaves too.
Think of contractors as skilled consultants who rent you their expertise but never quite unpack their bags. For short, well-defined projects, they’re excellent. For longer initiatives requiring deep organisational integration, they can feel like a perpetual house guest who never quite becomes part of the family.
The Vendor PM: The Tourist Guide
Now we get to the interesting one. Your telephony vendor or data centre supplier includes a project manager as part of the package. Brilliant! Someone who knows the product inside out, who’s delivered it countless times.
Except… have they really delivered your project?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about vendor PMs: they’re optimised for one specific outcome – getting their particular piece of technology installed. They arrive with a checklist (often laminated, always well-worn), and their success is measured by ticking every box on that list.
The Reality Check:
Your internal change management process? Not on their checklist. Integration with your crusty but critical legacy systems? “That’s outside our scope.” User adoption and training? “That’s a business-side concern.” Your weekly project governance meeting? They’ll dial in, but they’re probably on mute doing emails.
Vendor PMs are like tourists visiting your IT landscape. They turn up, follow their itinerary, take some photos (documentation, in this case), complete their mission, and head off to the next destination. They don’t learn your company culture, they don’t integrate with your internal teams, and they certainly don’t adopt your processes.
It’s not malicious – they’re simply playing a different game. Their success metric is “Did we install our system on time?” Your success metric should be “Did this actually solve our business problem?” These questions don’t always have the same answer.
The Vendor PM Pattern:
Picture this: Your new telephony system PM shows up for kickoff. They’re professional, they know their product, they have a plan. They coordinate with their engineers, manage their suppliers, run their technical installation. Three months later, the system is live. They hand you a completion document, schedule a lessons-learned call, and vanish.
Six months after that, you discover the new system doesn’t integrate properly with your CRM. Users are working around it rather than with it. Your internal IT team is firefighting issues they don’t fully understand. And the vendor PM? Long gone to their next installation.
Classic Vendor PM Phrases:
- “That’s working as designed”
- “You’ll need to log a support ticket for that”
- “Our documentation covers that scenario” (it doesn’t)
- “This integration worked fine at our last client”
- “That’s really a change management issue”
The vendor PM treats your project as a technical installation. You need it to be a business transformation. That’s quite a gap.
PMaaS: The Integrated Solution
Project Management as a Service offers something different: professional PM capability that actually integrates with your organisation whilst maintaining flexibility.
The PMaaS Difference:
Unlike contractors, PMaaS resources don’t have one eye constantly on the exit. Unlike vendor PMs, they don’t measure success purely by technical completion. Instead, they become genuinely embedded in your organisation, understanding your culture, adopting your processes, and measuring success by your business outcomes.
What This Actually Means:
A PMaaS resource learns people’s names. Revolutionary, perhaps, but true. They attend your stand-ups, use your project management tools (even if that means wrestling with your particular flavour of Jira), understand your governance frameworks, and know which stakeholders need careful handling.
They document in your systems using your templates. Knowledge stays in your organisation, not walking out the door at contract end or disappearing back to vendor HQ. When the project completes, you’re left with capability, not just a completed installation.
The Flexibility Factor:
Need someone three days a week for six months, then full-time during deployment, then part-time for handover? PMaaS accommodates this. No permanent headcount, no recruitment overhead, no IR35 headaches. Just the right level of PM capability exactly when you need it.
Perhaps most importantly, PMaaS resources are invested in your success, not just their deliverable. If users aren’t adopting the new system, that’s their problem to solve. If integration issues emerge post-deployment, they’re still there to help. If your steering committee needs reassurance, they’re the ones providing it.
The Real Question: Integration or Installation?
Strip away all the jargon and the fundamental question becomes clear: Do you need someone to install technology, or do you need someone to deliver change?
For simple, well-bounded technical deployments, a vendor PM might suffice. Data centre hardware installation? Probably fine. Standard software deployment with minimal integration? Could work.
But modern IT projects are rarely that simple. That “simple telephony upgrade” touches HR systems, integrates with collaboration tools, requires user training, demands process changes, and probably needs some political navigation around the FD who loved the old system.
That’s not an installation project. That’s a change programme. And change programmes need PMs who understand that technology is perhaps 20% of the challenge. The other 80% is people, politics, processes, and persuasion.
Making The Choice
Choose a contractor when: You need specific expertise for a defined period and you’re comfortable managing the handover when they leave. Good for covering sudden gaps or bringing specialist knowledge.
Choose a vendor PM when: You’re commissioning a straightforward product installation with minimal integration complexity, and you have internal capability to handle the change management, adoption, and business-side delivery. Set your expectations appropriately – you’re getting a technical installation manager, not a business transformation lead.
Choose PMaaS when: You want PM capability that integrates with your organisation, understands your context, adopts your processes, and measures success by business outcomes rather than technical completion. Particularly valuable for complex programmes, transformations, and any project where organisational change matters as much as technology deployment.
The Stoneseed Perspective
At Stoneseed, we’ve spent years watching organisations grapple with this choice. We’ve seen brilliant vendor PMs who delivered technically perfect installations that nobody used. We’ve seen contractors who solved immediate problems but left knowledge voids when they departed.
PMaaS emerged from a simple observation: organisations need flexible PM capability that actually integrates with their world. Not permanent headcount with all its overhead. Not temporary mercenaries who never quite commit. Not vendor specialists who optimise for installation rather than adoption.
Instead: professional project management resources who embed, adapt, integrate, and deliver – then scale up or down as your needs change. The capability when you need it, the flexibility to match demand, and the integration to ensure sustainable success.
It’s not revolutionary. It’s just better project management, delivered in a way that actually suits how modern organisations work.
Resource Utility. Delivering Outcomes. Leadership. Project Health.
Like Rudolph’s glowing nose cutting through Christmas fog, Stoneseed’s PMaaS helps guide your IT projects through complexity to successful delivery. Flexible, integrated, and focused on your outcomes.
Discover how PMaaS can transform your project delivery
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