Piecing together your Project Office and identifying the gaps

Looking at the talent and potential you have in your existing team is a great starting point.

Our previous insights have looked at building the right foundations for your project office, establishing a clear roadmap to deliver the strategy and getting the structure you will need in place to deliver it.  We now need to focus on how to achieve that structure and looking at the people element of building a project office.

Start with what you have

Forget for a moment you are building a projects team and think more generally about your experiences of team building elsewhere. Be that leading a professional team or coaching your child’s soccer team, there is one fundamental starting point and that is, to work with what you have!

A good approach is to start by understanding your existing team’s abilities, establishing the skills they have and what they can bring to your new look project office. However, the real skill is when you are able to look deeper than the almost superficial layer that is their current role; are they hungry for knowledge? willing to learn new things? keen to take on new challenges? in short do they show potential?

Perhaps they are your most dependable, consistent staff members, the safe pair of hands that will get the job done. They are happy continuing in their role and you are happy with their work, remember restructuring doesn’t mean changing things for the sake of it! A well-balanced project office will have a combination of the two, progression and stability and it is important to offer the right progression, training and development opportunities to demonstrate your commitment to their personal growth.

By ascertaining the existing ability and potential within the team, you can start to look at who can fulfil each role within the structure, remember though, this isn’t about moulding around one or two key people, it’s about where they fit best in your structure. The holistic process you have been through will engage your existing staff, either by continuing in a role that is perfectly suited to them or in new, challenging roles. If your structure requires a new role of a project delivery manager, do you have anyone who has the skills and experience? Your current project managers may not want to take a step down but is there anyone in the team, or elsewhere in the business that demonstrates the potential to step up?

That’s not to say this is an easy process. There may be some difficult decisions along the way; roles that no longer exist within your new structure and those in the team who don’t share your vision. The key here is to be objective, perhaps there is opportunity elsewhere in the business for someone to continue their progression or perhaps you reach the inevitable point where your staff outgrow your organisation.

Once you know where your existing team fits into your new structure, you will have identified your true skills gaps and will understand the skills and experience you need to fill them.

Identifying the Gaps?

With a relevant and specific structure for your team in place, and your current talent allocated to the right roles, you now need to focus on filling the gaps that you have left.  It is tempting to wait to recruit until the structure is bedded down but all that really achieves is a team of overworked project professionals who are not able to fully focus on the role they need to do.  It is important to invest the time in this early on and you need to be very clear on what you are looking for as this will save weeks of time later down the line.

Let’s not sugar coat it, the IR35 legislation changes for the private sector has completely shaken up the market. Where contractors once filled the majority of resourcing voids, that option is now less attractive. However, every cloud has a silver lining and the changes in legislation are forcing everyone to think harder about their options. There has been a big reliance on contractors over the years and the fact that it has been so easy to bring them in that it has negated the need to look at whether you actually need them.  Rather than take the easy route of hiring a quick-fix contractor, you may find that those skills exist within your team or perhaps you find you may need those skills on a more long-term basis.

So, with the contract market looking less attractive, where and how do you find the right people to fill skills shortages? The key point in this decision is time versus expertise. How long do you need the skill for and how skilled do they need to be?

We recommend starting with time. How many times have you rolled over a short- term contract for the sixth time in 18 months and you kick yourself for not bringing in someone via a fixed-term contract (FTC) or actually employing someone permanently? To get to this point in building your team, you should have a good handle on the time it’s going to take you to deliver the IT Strategy. If your delivery is looking more like two to three years, you should look to employ. If you think it could take around 12 months, we would suggest looking at FTC. But what about three to six months? This is where expertise comes into the equation.

12 to 24 weeks is not long, so what are you looking to achieve in this timeframe? Normally, it’s about fulfilling a very niche aspect of the delivery and leans more towards advisory roles rather than transactional project delivery. Buying in highly skilled people is expensive and let’s face it, that sort of expense is not something you want for very long. This is where a consultancy can add real value, with trained consultants with up-to-date specific and current expertise as well as the market insight you are looking for.

The ultimate goal here is to build a strong core team within your project office with adaptable and varied skills and experience, which can be enhanced, when necessary with subject matter or delivery experts. Up to this point we have been very focussed on building a core team to deliver the IT & Business Strategy, but you also need to consider how you grow and shrink this team, if you anticipate peaks and troughs in your project delivery. This flexible approach enables you to benefit from highly skilled consultants or contractors when you need them yet maintain lower headcount costs when you don’t.

The core/flex model is not new, but as with your core team you need to go through the same project and role analysis to better  anticipate what you will need. If you have been delivering projects for some time, you can use historical project data to understand the type and duration of projects that have come into scope throughout the year. It is important to continue in this vein, because you need to make sure that all the hard work you have done to date, is not undone by recruiting the wrong resources to quickly staff unexpected projects. The main difference is that you may not necessarily recruit these roles now, you just have to be aware of the need to recruit at some point in the near future. This will help you to budget and also prepare your stakeholders of the costs associated with peaks in delivery.

What do you need them to do?

With the timeframe of the requirements in place, you can then drill down into the lower-level requirements for each of your newly identified gaps in your team. If you are looking for a short-term consultant to bring subject-matter expertise or technology specific skills to the project office, then it would make sense that they will demonstrate relevant and up to date knowledge of this area. It’s always good to have an element of flexibility when establishing your essential requirements but you are paying a premium for someone that can bring experience to the team that you don’t have.

If it is a longer-term hire, FTC or permanent, then you may need to focus less on the specific technologies they have delivered and more on their stakeholder engagement, problem solving and all round skills. The better your requirements are at this stage, the more successful your recruitment process will be but remember this isn’t about looking for someone that ticks every box on paper but more about getting a balance between their skills and experience and their ability to compliment your existing team.

All of these steps will help you establish exactly what you need, making the recruitment process much more effective and streamlined. Knowing what you need is the first hurdle, our next insight will tackle how to find it and hire it!