Echo's Blog

There are many reasons organizations choose to hire a contracted project manager versus using someone internally but what are the pros and cons to evaluate when deciding if hiring an external project manager is the best fit for your organization?

We are excited to introduce you to StrAlign, a working prototype built by Echo Consulting to reconcile competing priorities and help teams focus on the highest impact projects. Our goal is to provide a tool that teams can use for ongoing, dynamic prioritization utilizing team-sourced input and leadership-driven strategic goals that allows you to lay the groundwork for successful execution of the highest value projects.

In today's blog post, we're going to cover the 5 phases of a project management lifecycle, which would typically fall under the Waterfall/Traditional project management methodology. This methodology can be followed for both large and small projects. A project management methodology can be as simple or as complex as is needed for the particular project you are working on. We hope you can apply these phases in any capacity that is helpful to you within your organization.   The 5 phases of traditional project management are: Initiation, Planning, Executing, Monitoring/Controlling and Closing. We will dive deeper into each one of these phases

Happy belated Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there. At Echo Consulting, we are proud to have so many Mothers on the team. You may be surprised by this but raising children & managing projects in many aspects aren’t that different – you start with hopes & ambitions and plan for how you want to nurture them to achieve that vision. Mothers are often considered the “project managers” of a household as cited in Science Daily “almost 9 in 10 women answered they felt solely responsible for organizing schedules of the family”. Mothers set and communicate expectations, keep the team on task and on schedule, as well as provide stability and guidance in uncertain situations. But how has our experience as Mothers contributed and helped certain project management skillsets grow?