IT innovation forms the core of many businesses, allowing them to better reach customers, communicate, and stay competitive. These benefits, however, are not without cost. Managing complex, burgeoning IT projects can be a burden on staff, finances, and growth, and doing so without the requisite expertise or understanding will only exacerbate these issues.

As a result, hiring an outside party to help plan and execute your IT projects will almost always result in a better outcome. Hiring IT project consulting services can contribute in several key ways that general project managers and in-house IT departments are unable to.

Keeping Projects on Track

In-house IT projects often take longer to execute than initially intended, extended for months or even years due to unforeseen circumstances and costly mistakes. For an IT project consultant, however, those circumstances will be entirely predictable. They will have worked with dozens of clients on projects across a range of configurations and seen almost every roadblock. They can apply the lessons learned from other organizations to yours, producing an accurate and feasible plan that is effectively tracked and reported.

Improving Business Efficiency

IT consultants have the tools and knowledge to effectively assess your business, spot its weak points, and architect a technological solution that fits your infrastructure and workflow. They understand that a good solution that is poorly integrated can end up causing more harm than good. Instead, they will help to streamline your business and IT processes to make employees more productive and less stressed.

Project Consulting Can Provides an Outside Perspective

Internal project managers are an invaluable asset. They’re experts in their specific niche and are intimately familiar with the company’s objectives, employees, and day-to-day processes.

Sometimes, however, these very aspects can become a hindrance. When you are too close to a project it can be difficult to see where the real issues lie. When you do identify a problem, office politics can come into play, with different parties pointing fingers and bringing their own bias to the table.

Conversely, by hiring outside IT project consulting services, those external consultants provide a more objective and distanced look at a situation. They’re as close to neutral ground as you can get, and are therefore a natural antidote to office squabbles and tunnel vision.

Cutting Costs

The biggest barrier to hiring an IT consultant is usually the cost. Only the largest companies have the need for a permanent consulting team. External consultants can be contracted for a defined period without the additional costs of company benefits or the productivity loss of office chit-chat. They get paid only for the hours they work and can be wholly concentrated on the project at hand.

Despite this, they bring the same financial benefits. As well as providing direct savings by spotting redundancies and ensuring projects don't go over budget, they can indirectly affect profits by:

  • Bringing new enthusiasm to struggling projects
  • Easing the burden on existing project members, allowing them to be more productive
  • Transferring invaluable knowledge to existing IT staff
  • Executing your project in a way that’s best suited to your business strategy

Choosing VirtuWorks for Your IT Project Consulting

As an MSP with over 25 years of experience, VirtuWorks has gathered some of the best engineers and IT consultants in the business. When you choose us for IT project consulting, we’ll use a series of meetings and consultations to plan a design that works for your business. You’ll then receive a dedicated project manager who will keep your project running smoothly, as well as track the project’s progress and provide regular reports. Finally, if something goes awry, VirtuWorks’ experienced staff will be available for on-site intervention.

Contact VirtuWorks today to learn more about keeping your project cost-effective, on track, and aligned with your strategic goals.