Project Management
Planning, scheduling, budgeting and delivery oversight for donor and client projects, with governance that keeps scope, cost and reporting under control.
Organisations delivering funded projects where reporting and scope discipline decide the next grant.
What the work covers
- Project design, logframe and work plan
- Scheduling, budgeting and cash flow planning
- Procurement planning and contract oversight
- Risk and issue management
- Donor and board reporting
- Project close-out and lessons learned
What you are left holding
- Logframe, work plan and budget
- Governance and reporting framework
- Periodic progress and variance reports
- Close-out report with lessons learned
The work in detail
Project management support covers design, logframe and work plan, scheduling, budgeting and cash flow, procurement planning and contract oversight, risk management, donor and board reporting, and close-out. It is bought either at design stage or, more often, when a project is already under way and reporting has begun to slip.
Most project failure we see is scope that was never fixed. So definition comes first: scope, deliverables, assumptions and exclusions agreed in writing. The plan then sequences activities with durations, dependencies and responsible parties, with a budget aligned to the schedule rather than to the calendar year.
Governance is set before delivery: decision rights, meeting cycle, reporting format and escalation route. During delivery, progress is tracked against baseline, variance is explained rather than absorbed, risks are reviewed on a fixed cycle, and changes go through a documented request. Close-out verifies deliverables against scope, reconciles accounts and assets, and documents lessons, which is frequently what determines whether the next grant is awarded.
Project Management
Scenarios, for reference
A project reporting activity, not results
Quarterly reports listed workshops held. The donor wanted movement against indicators. Rebuilding the logframe and reporting format around results made the same work legible, and fundable.
Scope creep by email
A client had accepted successive additions informally until the budget no longer matched the work. A documented change process, applied from that point, stabilised both scope and cash flow.
A close-out that could not be signed
Assets and accounts had drifted from records during implementation. A structured close-out reconciled both and produced a lessons document the next project actually used.