IT project leadership means taking responsibility for an IT project from end to end: scoping, coordinating internal teams and providers, arbitration, holding the schedule and budget, go-live.
Lunova, an information systems consulting firm based in Nyon, leads these projects for SMEs in Western Switzerland, on the client side, without building or reselling the solutions deployed.
Situations
When should you hand project leadership to an outsider?
Several situations can lead an SME to have an IT project led by an external party.
A major project arrives, with no internal lead available
A migration, an infrastructure renewal or the roll-out of a business application lands just when the IT team is already busy running day-to-day operations.
The project has started and it is drifting
Milestones slip, scope grows, the budget tightens, and decisions wait.
Several providers work on the same project
Each delivers its own part; nobody holds the whole, the interfaces between work packages or the common schedule.
The subject is technical, the stakes are business
The IT for a new building, a quality intranet overhaul or an archiving project commit the organisation as much as the information system.
Leadership approved the investment and has no visibility on real progress
Status updates are technical, and deviations are discovered late.
Results
What project leadership resolves
An end date and a budget that hold
Because they rest on a written scope and on tracking deviations, not on the optimism of the kick-off.
Clearly allocated responsibilities
Between the company, its business teams and its providers: who supplies what, who approves what, who decides what.
Providers steered from the client side
Including when several of them work on interdependent work packages.
A controlled workload for your teams
Coordination, deliverable tracking and running meetings do not add to their day-to-day work.
Decisions prepared and taken at the right time
With what is needed to arbitrate, without leadership having to go into technical detail.
Method
How Lunova leads a project
The project remains the company’s.
Lunova takes charge of running it, in four stages.
1 · Scoping
Expected business outcome, scope, budget, milestones, everyone’s roles on the company side and the provider side, risks identified from the outset. It is the document you return to when a new request appears along the way.
2 · Steering delivery
Running project meetings, tracking deliverables and milestones, coordinating providers and internal teams, dealing with deviations as soon as they appear. Decisions that go beyond the project are escalated to leadership instead of being absorbed in silence.
3 · Governance and decisions
A status report that leadership can read: progress, deviations, risks, decisions needed and their consequences. The project director’s role is to prepare the decision, not to take it in the client’s place.
4 · Go-live and close
Coordinating the cut-over, handing over to the teams who will run the solution, end-of-project review. User acceptance testing and user support belong to client-side advisory, which can be carried out in parallel.
Lunova does not develop, configure or integrate: specialists do the work. Its role is that of a conductor: analysing, selecting, challenging, coordinating, arbitrating with you and following delivery through to the result. When we know technologies or partners that we know work, we propose them because we consider that they meet the need.
Examples
Projects actually led
Lunova carries out recurring engagements and has led several dozen IT projects, on infrastructure subjects as well as business applications.
- migration from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams;
- migration from Exchange to Microsoft 365;
- move from SharePoint On-Premises to SharePoint Online, with document management set up;
- renewal and transformation of a core network;
- firewall projects;
- overhaul of a quality intranet, an engagement in which Lunova held both project leadership and client-side advisory;
- archiving projects;
- the IT side of constructing a new building.
The full account of the quality intranet overhaul, from the client side, is on the client-side advisory page. Both roles were held in parallel there: they remain distinct, but can be entrusted to the same person.
These projects differ in duration, stakeholders and risks. What they share is several providers involved, users who will have to change tools, and leadership expecting a result by a given date.
Deliverables
What you receive during and after the project
An IT project is not decided on technology alone. A scope that was never fixed, the absence of anyone with authority to decide, and a deviation discovered too late to fix without cost weigh just as much. Project leadership addresses these three points.
Lunova adapts to the project methodology the client already uses. Where there is none, the setup is defined at scoping.
In practice, most of what project leadership produces is gathered in the steering committee pack, presented and discussed at every meeting rather than scattered across separate documents. It covers:
- progress against the scope, schedule and budget set at scoping;
- deviations found and what they imply;
- open risks and the measures taken;
- decisions needed from leadership, with the options and their consequences;
- decisions taken at previous meetings.
Depending on the project, this is complemented by a scoping note at the start, a schedule kept up to date throughout, and an end-of-project review with the material handed over to the teams who will run the solution.
Two things are not included in this service: technical delivery, which belongs to the selected providers, and running the solution after go-live.
Comparison
Project leadership or client-side advisory: what do you really need?
Both services work on an IT project, but they do not answer for the same thing. They do not follow one another: they can be held in parallel, including by the same person.
What the role does
Project leadership
Lunova holds the steering and governance of delivery: scoping, schedule, budget, provider coordination, arbitration, risks, steering committees, go-live, close.
Client-side advisory
Lunova represents you as the client: expressing the need, specifications, tender, comparing responses, support in choosing, then user acceptance testing and user support.
The question you are asking
Client-side advisory
“Who defends our needs, from the specifications through to adoption by the teams?”
When to use it
Project leadership
When the project is decided and has to be held: several providers to coordinate, a budget and a date to meet, an internal team already stretched.
Client-side advisory
When the need is not yet written down: it has to be formalised, offers that cannot be compared have to be compared, and what is delivered has to be checked against it.
Before you decide
Frequently asked questions about IT project leadership
How much does outsourced project leadership cost?
The budget depends on the project itself: its duration, the number of providers to coordinate, the number of internal stakeholders and the level of steering expected. A project needs sustained presence during its critical phases and lighter follow-up between milestones. Scope and budget are set in the first conversation, before any proposal.
We already have an internal project manager. What does an external project director add?
An internal project manager knows the company, its ways of working and its constraints: a real asset. The difficulty lies elsewhere: they run the project on top of their day-to-day work, and sometimes have to negotiate with providers whose commitments they are not used to challenging. External leadership can either take over the project or support that project manager on provider coordination and preparing decisions.
Our integrator provides its own project manager. Is that enough?
The integrator’s project manager steers delivery of its own scope, and that is their role. They steer neither the other providers, nor the project’s impact on your organisation, nor the decisions that belong to the company. The two functions are complementary: one answers for its service, the other answers for the project to leadership.
Can you step in on a project that is already drifting?
Yes. Taking over starts with an assessment of the project: what has been delivered, what remains, what has been committed contractually and where the deviations lie. Then comes a reset of scope, schedule and roles, and steering resumes. An honest takeover means accepting that some initial decisions may be reopened.
Does Lunova also do the technical work?
No. Lunova does not develop, configure or integrate: delivery is the job of specialists, whether your existing providers or partners brought in for the project. This separation is what makes it possible to challenge a technical proposal without being judge and party.
How does a first contact work?
Through a thirty-minute conversation, with no commitment. Four points: what your project is and where it stands, what you have already committed, what first leads are possible, and whether to go further.