A new dog in town...

Hello Friend

I’m both excited and humbled to introduce “Sheepdog Projects”.

Having been fortunate enough to work many years in both consulting and corporate worlds, I’ve had the opportunity to work across projects of all types and sizes with many project teams, project managers and was myself both the project manager and technical developer in many instances. This gave me great exposure to the different styles and approaches, what is good, what is bad and where there are definite gaps.

In most cases I felt that the leadership approach in projects was lacking, and where modern tech services providers had moved on in their ways of working, project management was still stuck in old paradigms and antiquated approaches. Don’t get me wrong, and with all due respect, project management is a very deep, detailed and researched topic with a ton of technology innovation thrown at it continuously. However, I’ve often felt that in the moment, when critical engagement matters, there was something missing.

There were a couple of key factors that stood out. Project Managers, although sometimes highly competent in their field, were often lacking the technical skills and expertise, or were lacking the business functional experience and knowledge. This meant they didn’t really relate to the challenges technical teams were facing, and they couldn’t really understand and interpret what business stakeholders were asking. Therefore, in the moment, they were unable provide any advisory power to the engagement and had to default to people chasing and box ticking.

Another notable factor was that project methodologies were often too rigid and inflexible to match the pace and changing needs of the technical team. Having tried all the various methodologies and finding that even agile approaches would often work against the team, creating more frustration than advantage. What was needed was a truly hybrid approach that could flex in the moment but still keep governance in check.

In particular, I noted a gap in small to medium tech solution providers where they don’t possess massive budgets to employ the services of large PM consulting houses, and they don’t specifically have in-house project managers either as it’s not core to their business. Often in these cases, the technical team would share the burden of PM duties, increasing the risk of project over-run, and lacking the professional presentation of a dedicated service.

This is where the concept of Sheepdog was born. We simply loved the analogy of the dedicated and agile sheepdog rounding up the sheep and guiding them safely home. In our vision, we are the sheepdog, assisting the shepherd (your team) to herd the deliverables successfully over the line. We think that bringing deep technical and functional knowledge to the PM function and changing the paradigms of generic project management to fit modern tech providers is a game-changer. Watching a sheepdog in action is also fun, engaging and wow’s the audience and that’s exactly the experience we want to bring to our customers with our fresh take on project management.

I am also proud to announce that we are partnering with Insight Consulting on this venture. Insight Consulting has a long and established history in the consulting industry as a top niche player providing a range of tech solutions and services. This partnership will allow Sheepdog to tap into and leverage their vast well of skills and knowledge to support our new project management concept.

If you like the concept and think this is something that could be relevant to your team and upcoming projects then please submit your contact details so we can setup a call.

Don’t forget to check out more details about our services and what our customers think on this website, including some cool videos of sheepdogs in action.

Happy Herding!

Matt Craig

Director and Co-Founder

Sheepdog Projects