How important is it to involve project manager in pre-sales?

All too often organizations selling IT solutions ignore the role of project management up until the deal is done and the project is starting. In fact, up until it is too late. Organization are focused on selling products and licenses and ignoring - because it is complex and outside the comfort zone of sales department - the integration complexity that would need the inputs of a project manager. Project management is expensive and the pre-sales budget is often not big enough to support this cost.

Amongst the impact of this non-involvement are:

·         Missing or wrongly evaluated integration activities

·         Incorrect dependencies between activities

·         Little (if none) check on resources availability

·         Missed scope

·         Very difficult start of the project – as the knowledge transfer is delayed until the contract is signed

·         Bad customer satisfaction

·         Incorrect project budget…very likely overspending

·         This results in a project that starts on the wrong foot and very often means that the delivery will not match the success criteria established.

It’s always better to have an earlier involvement from project management and a better connection between pre-sales and operations processes.