Successful programs require a well balanced project team, bringing domain experience, expertise, enthusiasm and skills acquired from a broad array of situations. Selecting the right people is the single most important factor in delivering success.
I often hear about asset management firms that are undertaking major technology project or installing a new software system. Sometimes the firm does not have a suitable project manager to lead the team they are forming, so they go out and hire someone with a project management qualification.
This all sounds fine in principle, but the problem is that a project management qualification does not mean that the holder has any experience of using the new system being deployed, or the problems associated with that vendor, or has ever been involved in even a minor role in the deployment of the software in question.
Why, therefore, do some asset management firms take this approach when looking for talent? The answer is usually very simple: cost. It is cheaper to hire someone with the right qualification or ‘badge’, rather than someone who has direct project management experience with a particular vendor. This is because at the moment, in asset management operations, there is a lot of focus on the short-term bottom line: reducing day rates and taking out resource.
In my experience, the ‘badge route’ is an incredibly false economy. Without the right experience or domain knowledge, an asset management firm can spend a lot of money going nowhere fast. I would suggest that asset managers seek as much, relevant experience as they can, because these projects are very complex and they require resource that knows where the potential problems lie. In this way they can prepare a path to work around these issues, rather than just recording and circulating them for comment.
The basic principle for bringing in external resource is that you are seeking experienced individuals who have done similar projects for other companies. If you only want temporary labour than that is a different thing, but if you want to bring in external expertise that you don’t have then you must be prepared to pay for the right people.
The risk asset managers are taking in trusting someone who has no experience with that system is very high and the cost of project failure to the business far exceeds the extra cost of sourcing relevant experience. It is a very false and dangerous economy that is becoming worryingly common, especially among very big IT projects.
Cutting corners at the beginning of a project will lead to overspend at the end of the project. Asset managers should be focused on what they are trying to achieve in the timeframe they need to achieve it.
A project management qualification, to my mind, does not qualify anyone to manage a complex financial software implementation project.
