Why is it a bad idea for professional consulting services to bring own Project Managers to customer engagements

I’ve been in professional consulting services for quite sometime, and I’ve noticed that consulting side, particularly for large size engagements, try to include Project Managers as a part of consulting contract. Although I do see the logic why consulting services want to do so, I’ve seen more troubles and challenges with that approach than benefits. Let me explain why.

Let’s first discuss about why professional consulting services want to do this.

• Project Managers also consume hours. So, for large size customer engagements, this is an easy way to quickly consume hours from the total bucket of hours assigned for that contract
• Not every consultants are good at communicating with customers with non-technical matters, and some do not even want to do that at all. In this case, having project managers can be seen as a good way to help with that process.
• Project Managers can be the middle person who can sit between if any tension or conflict arises, and they can be the one who organize what happened and what need to be done and communicate between consulting service side and customers.

Before talking about other bads, let’s talk about some points above and see why that is still not the best way.

Project Managers also consume hours. So, for large size customer engagements, this is an easy way to quickly…