(WARNING: TONGUE-IN-CHEEK BLOG AHEAD)
There’s a dangerous new trend creeping into IT project and change portfolios: organisations quietly swapping contractors and permanent headcount for Project Management as a Service (PMaaS).
Terrible idea. PMaaS is suspiciously good at saving money, reducing stress and getting projects delivered on time and within budget, and frankly, where’s the fun in that?
To protect the long-standing tradition of over-spending on under-delivering projects, here are seven solid reasons not to resource using PMaaS.
(If you recognise your organisation in any of these, congratulations, like the majority you’re doing waste like a pro!!!!)
SEVEN SOLID REASONS NOT TO RESOURCE USING PMAAS.
1 – YOU LOVE OVERPAYING FOR THINGS YOU NEVER USE
Let’s start with the most offensive aspect of PMaaS: you pay for project management capacity you actually use, when you use it. Rascals! Capacity flexes with the work, not with how long someone’s chair is warm. That means less cash burned while projects sit in steering committee limbo or wait for a vendor to “just finalise the patch”.
Stick with traditional contractors and you can heroically fund full day‑rates during every delay, dependency clash and “let’s park this until next quarter” moment. I mean, think of the local economy: coffee shops, sandwich bars and co‑working spaces all rely on bored project folk billing while nothing happens. Why would you let PMaaS turn that steady trickle of waste into something as dull as “cost optimisation”?
Apart from anything else, if you don’t overspend this year, you might not get the same budget next year (spoiler: you might not need it!).
2 – YOU LOVE OPAQUE!
One of the most offensive things about PMaaS is how achingly transparent it is. You get real‑time views of progress, burn, risks, decisions and who’s actually doing what. Stoneseed’s P3MO dashboards show which work is stuck, which milestones are slipping and exactly where money is going … in time for you to do something about it. Terrible news if your current approach is “let’s hope nobody notices until year‑end”.
Stick with traditional, fragmented reporting and you can keep everyone comfortingly in the dark. Status can stay delightfully vague, RAGs can be massaged right up to the go‑live-cliff-edge, and budget surprises can continue to arrive fashionably late. PMaaS spoils all this by turning project data into a single version of the truth that sponsors, teams and auditors can all see without needing a secret decoder ring.
Where’s the plausible deniability in that?!
Serious bit: PMaaS is usually delivered through shared tools and standardised reporting, so stakeholders get consistent, near real‑time status information, and data on spend, risks and decisions. That level of transparency builds trust, makes earlier intervention possible and reduces the “nasty surprises” that so often derail big IT programmes.
3 – YOU ENJOY MYSTERY SKILLS
Just before closing time, a local kebab shop offers what it calls “The Mystery Meat Kebab”. It’s just a mix of all the meat (chicken, lamb …) they have carved into those “keep-warm” tins, haven’t sold, and which they want to shift before they go shut!
I’ve always found it amazing how well they sell! It’s clearly a popular concept!
Similarly, in IT Project resourcing, one of the great joys of hiring individuals is also the lucky‑dip factor. Sometimes you get a gem; sometimes you get a “project manager” whose main skill is colour‑coding the RAID log … after the disaster. The suspense is half the fun.
PMaaS totally ruins this.
Instead of gambling on a single CV, with PMaaS you buy into a capability: a team with known skills, sector experience and up‑to‑date methods. Need someone who has already survived three large‑scale migrations or a gnarly regulatory project? Stoneseed will have one, and a friend in PMO who has seen the reporting side too. You can even blend skills – PM, PMO, BA, change – without starting a new recruitment cycle each time.
I mean, where’s the chaos in that??!
4 – YOU LOVE NICELY BLOATED OVERHEADS
Traditional resourcing models are brilliant at quietly inflating your fixed cost base. Permanent headcount, contractors on rolling extensions, line management, desk space, hardware – it all adds up beautifully.
Darn PMaaS behaves more like a utility. You turn it up when a portfolio spike hits, then turn it back down when the wave passes. You get the outcomes without a huge permanent footprint. This is a disaster if you’re sentimentally attached to overheads that no one quite remembers justifying. If your comfort blanket is a chunky fixed cost line, PMaaS and its variable, outcome‑focused commercials will feel dangerously efficient.
5 – YOU’RE ALLERGIC TO FLEXIBILITY
If there’s one thing PMaaS is built for, it’s flex. You can add an extra PM for three months, switch in more PMO support, bring in a BA when requirements get squishy, then scale back again when you’re through the crunch. Delivery capacity starts to match actual demand, not org charts.
Of course, if you get a buzz from telling the business “we’d love to do that, but we don’t have a resource slot until the next financial year”, this is appalling news. Rigid headcount and fixed contractor numbers are far better at generating backlog, frustration and shadow IT. Don’t let PMaaS wander in with its portfolio‑level agility and ruin a perfectly good bottleneck.
6 – YOU DON’T WANT PROJECTS FINISHED TOO EFFICIENTLY
Experienced PMaaS teams turn up with playbooks, templates, governance and boring things like risk management and benefits tracking. They standardise the basics, automate the repetitive and focus people on delivering outcomes rather than reinventing the wheel on every project.
But be honest: without surprise overruns, executive fire‑fighting and heroic last‑minute recoveries, how will anyone prove their leadership credentials? If projects start landing when they said they would, within the budget everyone actually remembers signing off, a lot of people’s favourite “war stories” will evaporate. PMaaS lives or dies by repeatable delivery; if you’re emotionally invested in “zombie projects” that never quite finish, you might find that unsettling.
7 – YOU GET YOUR KICKS FROM DANGEROUSLY HIGH STRESS LEVELS
Finally, and perhaps most dangerously, PMaaS has an annoying habit of making life calmer.
PMaaS is therefore not for the adrenaline junkie! Better visibility, clearer governance, consistent communication and predictable capacity all reduce the background hum of panic that many change environments have come to see as normal.
If your management style relies on permanent crisis, late‑night war rooms and “all hands” emails, PMaaS is a terrible choice. It tends to turn big, scary programmes into a rolling set of managed, predictable deliveries. People start going home on time – imagine! Status meetings become… bearable. Stakeholders know what’s happening without needing to interrogate five spreadsheets and a rumour. For some leaders, that level of serenity is frankly suspicious.
CONCLUSION
If your goal is to maximise waste, uncertainty and drama, avoid PMaaS on your next big transformation, migration or ERP adventure. Keep the contractors billing while nothing moves, cherish the overhead, and never, ever risk too much transparency.
However, and in the interests of balance, I appreciate that there are those open to a calmer, more flexible way to get change delivered, an oasis of workplace peace where you pay for value, not just presence, and tap into a ready‑made capability instead of building one from scratch every time. If that’s you (you crazy outlier), it might be worth a conversation about how PMaaS could plug into your portfolio.
Beware. It could work so well that you have to look elsewhere for your daily dose of danger.
I’ll give you that kebab shop’s location.
