Internal project, external team: when is it convenient?

Companies live through projects. Some of them are so tied to characteristic management that they require long stages of preparation, other times they are born suddenly.

February 10, 2020

Maybe the revenues have stopped unexpectedly, or a new player has come into the market. Or, one of the information systems must be quickly replaced by migrating entire internal procedures from one tool to another, or it is necessary to adapt some business practices to the wishes of the new CEO.

Whatever the business need,the answer is one: act, quickly, putting in place the best specialized professionalism in ferrying the Company to the expected goal.

How to manage effectively and efficiently a short-term, strategic-impact project?

The most intuitive solution is to hire new staff, to cope with the emergency. But how to behave at the end of the project? Each new resource, after need, will be a burden for the company, difficult toreallocate.

To overcome the hiring constraint, you can launch into the search for freelance full time. But how to absorb the long selection times of a suitable figure and possess all the necessary skills? In addition, getting people to work together by obtaining a team that can respond to the objectives is itself a job (anything but trivial) that will have to be delegated internally to the management, absorbing time and resources.

You can contact your suppliers for advice or quotes. This is in fact the way that often comes to mind first. By doing so you can get lucky and find a real solution quickly; Many more often partial, short-term solutions are found, focused on areas and objectives limited to the supplier’s vision (and interests). This road is suitable for large projects, with well-defined perimeters and parameters; suppliers answer tender requirements. and have the convenience to move according to certain logics and certain economic commitments often well predictable.

Which way to choose, when the project type has a more complex profile than usual, the timing is tight, and its impact on the business roadmap is high?

Relying on an external team: key benefits

One way is to use the support of a wide-ranging Consulting Company, able to take charge of the project and to organize in a short time an ad hoc team of professionals ready to support the Company.

Consulting companies have been doing this for a long time with a model that focuses on their unique and trained resources, to which they add any external expertise. It works, but at great cost.

Some consulting firms, however, are understanding the evolutionary dynamics of the sector and have developed dedicated and structured processes to provide teams precisely faster, performing and that answer more complex business questions than the ordinary, without taking overhead to resell (necessarily) at rates too high for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The first advantages? Delegate to the External Company the process of creating the team and intervene only in the final phase of choosing professionals, avoid the costs of hiring staff and obtain a task force ready for action in record time. pronta all’azione.

Choosing an external team to fill an internal design need also has many other benefits. Here are the main:

Diversified teams

If the project is complex and touches multiple business areas, you need professionalism from different training. An impossible mission for a classic enterprise. One of the basics for an external company capable of selecting the right profiles from the market and putting together versatile teams.

Professionals already trained

If you had to choose from your employees a team to allocate on the new project, the next step would be to provide them – until then engaged in their standard tasks – the correct training. This will waste time and money. Assigning the project to a Consulting Company allows you to overcome this hurdle: the proposed professionals already have the necessary skills, they are always up to date and are immediately activated.

Objective vision

Especially if the new project challenges the basic logic of the company, it will be difficult to obtain from internal employees or already hired suppliers, really disruptiveevolutionary perspectives: what resource hired would allow tocriticize a corporate modus operandi and to question the choices made by management? An external team, on the other hand, is less involved in endogenous dynamics and was born precisely to provide an objective point of view and not contaminated by internal currents.

Overview

Consulting companies manage to keep a look at the various aspects of the business. Tidying up the company by quickly understanding which nodes it is important to untie right away to avoid continuing to repeat in meetings and without ever having a change or result is now more than ever a strategic priority.

Flexibility

After the project is finished, the commitment is over: an external team is hired to complete a specific task. After the deadline, each commitment expires, freeing the company from economic burdens and ethical responsibilities.

Prepared, specialized, fast: a pool of experts can lead every business to unexpected goals, offering an effective and efficient consulting service in every respect.