A shortlist in 72 hours, contributing inside two weeks, and a 30-day guarantee if the fit is wrong.
72-hour shortlist · 30-day replacement guarantee · Month-to-month
There is a version of project management that consists entirely of collecting status and presenting it upward. It is busy, it is visible, and it changes nothing.
You can spot it in the reports. The same item appears in the blockers column for three consecutive weeks. It is accurately recorded each time. Nobody has phoned the team that owns the dependency, escalated to the person who can reassign it, or proposed working around it. The blocker has been managed as information rather than as a problem.
The job is the intervention. Knowing which of eleven risks is the one that will actually sink the date, and spending your week on that instead of updating the other ten. Getting a decision out of somebody who has avoided making it. Being the person who says a date is not achievable while there is still time to do something about it.
That last one is why this hire is difficult. The behaviour you want is occasionally unwelcome, and interviews reward people who are pleasant and organised. Those are not the same trait.
The distinction running through all of these is between visibility and intervention.
Evidence of blockers actually cleared, not blockers accurately recorded. We ask for specific examples and what they personally did.
Tracking work that has not started but should have, including across vendors and teams they have no authority over.
Whether they have told a sponsor something unwelcome while there was still time to act on it, and what happened next.
Keeping a running total of small additions and stating the cost of each, rather than absorbing them and reporting slippage later.
Enough to know when an estimate is being padded or an approach is being oversold. They do not need to code; they need to not be bluffed.
A live conversation in English, every time. This role is conversation under pressure with people who outrank them.
Weak project management does not produce chaos. It produces a project that is green until it is red, with nothing in between.
The pattern is well known enough to have a nickname: green on the outside, red in the middle. Status stays amber-at-worst because each individual team is only slightly behind and nobody aggregates the slippage. Then an integration date arrives, two components do not fit, and the schedule moves by two months in a single meeting. Everybody had the information. Nobody was holding the whole picture.
The specific failure underneath is usually dependencies. Work that requires another team, a vendor, a security review or a data extract sits waiting, and waiting is invisible in most reporting because nothing is red — the task simply has not started. A capable PM tracks the things not yet begun that should have been, which is a different discipline from tracking progress on things underway.
Scope behaves the same way. Nobody approves a fifteen per cent expansion. It arrives as twenty small additions, each obviously reasonable, none individually worth a conversation about the date. Without somebody keeping a running total and saying what each one costs, the team is later accused of being slow on a project that grew by a fifth without anybody deciding to grow it.
Project Manager (3–5 years). Runs a defined project with an established plan. Coordinates a team, tracks progress, reports accurately. Escalates when told to.
Senior PM (5–8 years). Owns delivery across teams and vendors. Manages dependencies actively, negotiates scope against date, and escalates on judgement rather than on instruction.
Programme Manager (8+ years). Owns several related projects and the interfaces between them, manages senior stakeholders with competing priorities, and can stop work that is no longer worth finishing.
Delivery of a defined project. A build with a scope and a date. The standard engagement.
Recovery. A project already late and losing confidence. Different work — mostly re-establishing what is true before anything else can be planned.
Vendor and multi-party coordination. Where the critical path runs through organisations you do not control. Consistently underestimated.
Migration and cutover. Sequencing, rehearsal and rollback planning, where the risk concentrates in a single weekend.
Alongside enterprise implementations. Frequently paired with business analysts, because scope disputes are usually requirements disputes wearing a schedule costume.
Week one. They establish what is actually true, which on an existing project rarely matches the plan. Expect them to talk to engineers individually rather than relying on the stand-up, because people report differently in a group. Expect a revised view of the date within the first fortnight, and expect it to be worse than the one they inherited.
Weeks two to four. Dependencies mapped with named owners and dates, the two or three genuine risks separated from the register of theoretical ones, and at least one long-standing blocker actually cleared. That last item is the signal — it demonstrates they will pick up the phone rather than add a line to a report.
The warning sign is a beautiful status report in week two. Reporting is the easiest part of this job to do well and the least valuable. A PM whose first visible output is a dashboard, with no accompanying uncomfortable conversation about the date, is optimising for how the project looks.
Interviewing on methodology. Whether somebody prefers Scrum or something else predicts very little. Ask instead about a project they could not save and what they did, or about a time they told a sponsor something unwelcome. The answers are much harder to rehearse.
Hiring a PM to fix an unclear scope. A project failing because nobody agreed what it is will not be rescued by better tracking. That is an analysis problem, and adding schedule discipline to an undefined scope produces precise reporting about the wrong thing.
Valuing calm over candour. A PM who never brings bad news is not managing a project without problems. Reward early warnings, or you will train the role into telling you what you want to hear until the point where that stops being possible.
Expecting a PM to substitute for a technical lead. They can sequence work, chase dependencies and protect a team. They cannot judge whether an approach is sound or an estimate is honest. Projects that lack a technical owner do not get one by hiring a project manager.
Rates depend on seniority, programme complexity, and engagement length. Tell us the role and we will give you a firm number.
Tell us the role and we will send a shortlist within 72 hours.
Tell Us the RoleTell us the role. Three to five profiles within 72 hours.