If you look at most successful IT projects, large or small, they have several things in common. They start on time, they usually have a simple plan that everyone can follow, if issues arise along the way (which they always do) they are dealt with quickly and not allowed to drag on and finally they are brought to conclusion without leaving any loose ends.
This is where the value of having a good project manager involved right from the start until the very end really pays off. If you sit down and look at the initial costing and final costings of any project and then compare them, you will generally find that a lot of the final costs are attributable to "unforeseen" issues that arose along the way.A good project manager should be able to spot many of these issues before they become problems and prevent situations where the hardware people are blaming the software people, the software people are blaming the network people, the network people are blaming the broadband provider and you are left in the middle with a system that doesn't work.
