I once joined a project where the exhausted subject matter expert (SME) assigned to run things jokingly said, “I’ve become a full-time project manager who dabbles in my actual job!”. They were so relieved to have someone arrive to take some of the project governance and delivery off their hands. 

Sadly, this is a trap that many organisations fall into. A new project is defined to deliver a specific outcome for a product or proposition, and the most relevant SME, who works with this offering day-in, day-out, is assigned to run it. Makes sense; after all, they’re the expert – surely they’re the best person to run the project day-to-day, no? 

No. Even the best experts can’t do it all. 

The SME starts their project with enthusiasm but struggles to juggle this new role of project manager alongside every other role they already play in BAU. Soon enough, momentum fades and the project stalls. There’s duplication of effort as the project team doesn’t have a clear list of actions and owners. A lack of clarity makes any progress inefficient. Teams start to feel strained, and everyone involved starts to feel that they’re wasting their time.  

Recovering from here is so much harder for all involved than if there’d been a tendency toward over-management from the beginning. It’s much easier to scale down project management structure than it is scale it up. 

At BeyondFS, what we’ve learned through years of supporting large, high-pressure projects is that over-management at the beginning is not overkill – it’s what keeps things on track when complexity inevitably rears its head. 

Project management is not a secondary function; it is the structural backbone that prevents overlap, missed deadlines, and rework. We would always recommend pairing an SME with someone with project management expertise from the outset. This approach means that it’s clear who’s accountable for what: one person focuses on the ‘what’, i.e. domain-specific goals, and the other focuses on the ‘how’ – delivery and execution.  

Are you on a project team where momentum has dropped? From our experience, here’s what an under-managed project tends to look like: 

• Dynamic Scope: Constant movement and confusion around what is and isn’t the project’s responsibility – due to failure to pin this down right at the start of the engagement 

• Roles and responsibilities are unclear: Team members turn up to meetings without understanding what they’re doing there, the expectations from them, or what the agenda should be. 

• The project milestones are unclear or keep changing: There’s no overarching roadmap or timeline, setting projects up for failure when it comes to communication and reporting and results in missing critical delivery deadlines 

• Good intentions, no ownership: Discussions in which many great ideas are laid out, but team members fail to commit to owning actions and decisions, and keep each other accountable. If this is what you’re facing, it’s not too late to put in place proper project management structures.