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Put an Engagement Lead in charge of every engagement

Strategy Overview

Assign every engagement a single senior technical owner, the Engagement Lead, who holds it from the first client conversation through to the delivered outcome. Final decisions about the engagement, ownership of the client relationship, and all client-facing communication belong to that person. Today most of that sits with a project lead or project manager.

The Engagement Lead is an assignment rather than a job title, most often filled by a Solution Architect. Project management does not disappear. Where an engagement warrants a project manager, they support and report to the Engagement Lead. Where it does not, the Engagement Lead carries those responsibilities directly, and many engagements will not need a PM at all.

We have delivered this way many times already. What changes is that it stops being the exception we offer when a client asks for it, and becomes how we run engagements by default.

Motivating Factors

We already know we can deliver this way. This pattern has run repeatedly at SOLTECH, with the architect genuinely driving and leading the project and typically no SOLTECH project manager involved at all. Gagan ran a team inside AdvancedEd. Chris Drake did it at 3DR last year. Ray has been doing it at Hutrics and HC1 and is still doing it today. Even contractors have worked this way, with Antonio operating in this mode to some degree at Kaizen.

We have called it different things depending on how it was sold: a Scrum Team, a staffing engagement with an architect involved, or, under the Project Services banner, a Dedicated Staffing Engagement. The distinguishing characteristic was always commercial rather than operational: the client owned all project management responsibility and we charged by the hour.

So the constraint has never been capability. It has been positioning. We only sell this way when we already know the client wants to self-own project management. The proposal here is that this becomes the default delivery model rather than the arrangement we offer when asked.

The engagement model no longer fits the shape or the size of the work. We need to move to a more continuous model, because the staged one we built stopped making sense for smaller projects. We are already having trouble selling a design engagement when the core effort is small, and that will not improve. Clients now arrive with a pile of AI-generated requirements, pre-built UI screens, or a half-finished application, and they want a quote or they simply want it finished. Against that, proposing a design phase, a formal kickoff, a project manager and the usual startup activities is not palatable. For an engagement that runs two to four weeks, weekly status reports and standing project meetings are not value, they are a visible fraction of the budget. What these clients will buy is an architect engaged from day one who jumps straight into whatever they already have, with other resources brought in later if the work calls for it.

Architects are already doing implementation. The change has partly happened without a decision. Architects lead and participate in more of the implementation work than they did two years ago, while less classic development work reaches developers.

What we have slipped into is a mixed model that we never tuned a process for. Some projects are run by a project manager and surface through Tom's operational management. Some are effectively run by an SA and are more likely to come up in SA meetings with Thayer. And some are run by an SA but tracked only by an account manager, Austin, Veanne or Ann, because they look like a staffing engagement in structure and sit outside our internal project reporting altogether, even though they still tend to need occasional attention from Thayer or Tom when something goes wrong.

Three delivery paths, three different sets of eyes, and no single view of how the work is actually being run.

The handoff is expensive and no longer necessary. The design-then-implement split existed because architects were scarce and expensive and developers were plentiful and cheaper, so you used the architect to specify and the team to execute. AI has collapsed the cost of execution. The economics that justified the handoff no longer hold, but the process built on them still runs.

We sell an experience and then withdraw it. Clients choose us because we show deep and fast understanding of their need during the sales cycle, and they expect that same level of depth and experience once we engage. Early on they get it. Our process for putting an architect on initial work is clean and effective, and it is one of the things we genuinely do well. Then the experience degrades. The architect steps back to story management and oversight, and a non-technical project manager becomes the primary liaison. The client never asked for that substitution, and it happens immediately after they commit.

Project management is not currently our strongest point of client leadership. We do not have real confidence that our internal project managers are seen as the respected leader of our projects. Putting a PM front and center as the owner of client communication carries risk: they cannot address every question that comes up, clients generally do not perceive them as the driver of the work, and our architects report that PMs do not always understand the detail well enough for their effectiveness to be reliable. That is not an argument that project management has no value. It is an argument that it is the wrong role to put at the head of the engagement.

Solution Approach

Assign every engagement a named Engagement Lead who owns it end to end.

Three things belong to the Engagement Lead, without ambiguity:

  • All final engagement decisions
  • Ownership of the client relationship
  • Ownership of all client-facing communication

Today most of that sits with a project lead or project manager. It moves.

The role is an assignment, not a title. We use different terminology deliberately, because Engagement Lead describes what someone is accountable for on a specific piece of work rather than where they sit in the organization chart. The role calls for a senior technical resource with sound judgment, strong consulting skills, and enough trust from the firm to make real-time decisions and commitments in front of a client. In practice that will often be a Solution Architect. But not every current SA will be the right person to lead every engagement, and people holding other titles may be entirely capable of leading one, depending on the complexity and scale of the work. Separating the role from the title is what lets us match the person to the engagement rather than to the roster.

Project management does not disappear. It reports into the engagement. Where the work warrants it, a project manager is assigned to support the engagement. They support and report to the Engagement Lead rather than operating on a separate line of accountability to the client or to a delivery manager. Where an engagement is small enough that a dedicated PM is not warranted, the Engagement Lead simply carries the traditional project management responsibilities directly. Many engagements will not need a PM at all.

The real constraint is not headcount. Hiring more Solution Architects is already something the leadership team supports, and it is the obvious lever to reach for. On its own it is an incomplete answer, and a slightly risky one.

The actual constraint is how effectively we onboard, train and build trust in a senior technical person, up to the point where we are genuinely confident handing them an engagement. That takes time and it takes structure. Even our current architects, including people who have been here a while, need support and oversight to deliver effectively today. The role described here carries more authority than that, not less: final engagement decisions, commitments made to a client in real time, sole ownership of the relationship. Handing that out faster than we can support it is how the model fails.

So the work is not "hire more SAs." It is building the oversight and support structure that makes an Engagement Lead effective, together with a deliberate path by which someone earns that assignment. Hiring against the current structure would leave us with more people and the same bottleneck, and it would put trust into the field before we have the means to back it up.

How we restructure the organization, and how we create the right leverage from the SA talent we already have, are the subject of other strategies and deliberately not covered here.

Tactical Changes

Structure Process People
Significant Significant Significant

Structure Changes: Significant

  • Every engagement carries a named Engagement Lead, and that assignment becomes the primary unit of delivery accountability rather than the project or the project manager
  • Engagement Lead is maintained as an assignment separate from job titles, so the eligible pool is defined by demonstrated capability rather than by the current SA roster
  • Project management moves from operational ownership to a support function inside the engagement, directed by the Engagement Lead rather than through a separate Delivery Manager reporting line
  • The three parallel governance paths we run today, PM-run, SA-run, and account-manager-tracked, collapse into one. Every engagement has a lead and appears in the same reporting
  • Engagement Leads, not PMs, become the responsible party for project reporting and execution
  • The operational reporting structure has to be redefined. Management reporting today runs from the PM to the Director of Delivery and up into leadership operations meetings, while SAs report to the CTO. That split is itself one of the reasons leadership can hold different understandings of the same project: ownership is dual, so the picture arrives by two routes. Condensing ownership into the Engagement Lead removes that duality, and there are several viable ways to roll Engagement Leads up into operational and program management. That structure is open for discussion if we decide to proceed
  • Reporting and financial views roll up by engagement rather than by delivery path

Process Changes: Significant

  • Ownership of client communication moves to the Engagement Lead
  • An engagement is assigned its lead at the point of sale, not after a design phase completes
  • The handoff between design and implementation disappears, along with the rework it causes
  • Delivery stays in the same hands that estimated the work. The estimate comes first, so the person who committed to the number is the person accountable for meeting it
  • Where no PM is assigned, the Engagement Lead carries project management responsibilities directly, which means the process has to be light enough for one person to run
  • The delivery shape we have sold as a Dedicated Staffing Engagement becomes the standard, rather than a variant offered when a client wants to self-own project management

People Changes: Significant

  • Engagement Lead eligibility is determined by capability rather than by title. Some current SAs will not be assigned as leads, and some people holding other titles will be. That determination is sensitive and needs an explicit, defensible basis rather than an informal one
  • The architects are supportive. An informal survey of several SAs about this model found them all in favor of it. The single caveat raised was having enough time to be successful while taking on the additional responsibilities. All of them felt this model would likely work better than what we do today
  • Project managers move to a support role taking direction from the Engagement Lead. This is a meaningful change to the role and to how PM performance is judged, and it needs to be handled directly rather than allowed to be inferred
  • If the change leaves insufficient work to fully utilize the existing PM team, it could lead to a reduction in that team, alongside an increase in the size of the SA team. That trade should be made deliberately rather than allowed to happen by attrition
  • Contractor arrangements for Engagement Leads become harder to sustain. The role becomes more critical to client support and success, which means we cannot simply roll someone off, or afford to lose them, when they are not fully utilized. We should expect to engage Engagement Lead resources on longer-term, guaranteed commitments, even where that means carrying bench time for non-FTEs

Additional Details

The key-person risk this creates. Concentrating engagements into a small number of individuals increases an already significant exposure. Client loyalty is migrating from SOLTECH to specific people, and this strategy accelerates that. It should be paired with deliberate work to codify method, tooling and deliverables so that value accrues to the firm and not only to the person. That is worth its own strategy.

What this does to utilization, and to the case for hiring. Where the Engagement Lead carries all project management responsibilities, we have to allot enough time for it honestly rather than assuming it absorbs into the margins. But that same shift may make the capacity problem easier rather than harder. PM time and budget effectively becomes Engagement Lead time, which means a lead can blend design, oversight, project management and hands-on engineering to fill a week. That allows an SA to carry fewer concurrent engagements while staying fully utilized, which is a better outcome for quality and for the client. It also speaks directly to a tension we already have internally: the feeling that we need to hire more SAs, set against the question of how we keep them off the bench if we do. This model answers both at once.