What a 6-month embedded project manager engagement looks like
Month by month: what actually happens when a contract PM embeds with your team for an ERP implementation, a systems integration, or a migration.
Organizations usually call a contract PM at one of three moments: an ERP implementation is mid-flight and drifting, two companies just became one and their systems have not, or a migration everyone deferred is now urgent. Here is what the engagement actually looks like from the inside, based on programs delivered at a utility, a pipeline company, and a university.
Month 1 — read everything, change nothing
The first weeks are requirements archaeology: reading the integration specs, sitting in the standing meetings, interviewing the people who actually operate the systems. The deliverable is an honest map — what is actually done (not what the status deck says), what is blocked, and which risks have owners versus which just have mentions.
A technical PM earns trust here differently than a process PM: when the integration team says an interface can't do something, you open the spec and check. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes the vendor's own documentation disagrees.
Months 2–3 — make the plan true
Most troubled programs don't lack a plan; they lack a plan anyone believes. This phase rebuilds the backlog into something the delivery team co-owns: real dependencies, real capacity, decisions escalated to the people entitled to make them. On a $4B acquisition integration, the hard work was rarely technical — it was getting two organizations to agree on which system of record survives.
Months 4–5 — delivery rhythm
Releases ship on a cadence. Testing is a workstream, not an afterthought — data migration especially. When we moved 1,000+ SharePoint sites and over a terabyte of content at a utility, the migration tooling was the easy half; the hard half was the validation pass that proved nothing load-bearing broke.
Month 6 — make yourself unnecessary
The engagement ends with the internal team running the rhythm without you: documented decisions, a risk register someone owns, and a handoff that survives contact with the next quarter. A contract PM who becomes permanent infrastructure has failed at the job.
When this fits
Platforms with delivered work behind this offer: Workday, Appian, MuleSoft, ServiceNow, Salesforce, SharePoint and Office 365. Industries with receipts: energy and utilities, higher education, real estate, public sector. Engagements run 6–12 months and are limited to what one person can do well — the offer in detail is here, and the founder's full track record is on his profile page.