About Us

Colab was founded in 2008 in South Africa, on the belief that strategies often get stuck before they can be executed, leading to a significant loss of value for organizations.
Our name reflects our commitment to collaboration with clients, staff, providers, and partners. Colab is a value-driven organization. Our Core Values shape our behaviors and define our culture. These values are crucial to our success. Colab exists to empower our clients to refine and implement targeted strategies, enabling them to unlock hidden value through Best-Practical™ project execution, supported by flexible capacity to Project and PMO teams.
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“At Colab, we strive to be the preferred partner for strategy consulting, project execution, and project team augmentation services for business leaders in South Africa and EMEA. We recruit and develop world-class people based on our 3C model – Competence, Character, and Chemistry. Combining great people with our signature Best Practical™ approach, creates a winning formula that helps our clients excel in strategic project execution. Building trust with our clients is our ultimate goal, enabling us to forge long-term partnerships grounded in your confidence in our approach, mindset, and commitment to results.
Barend Cronjé – Founder & CEO of the Colab Group

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Leadership and people

The leadership team and our people at Colab.

Barend Cronjé

Chief Executive Officer

Barend has a proven ability to distil complex business challenges into “Best Practical™” frameworks and then create movement in the team to execute on a roadmap.
He is a highly skilled neutral facilitator and helps business leaders talk through their thinking in a way that connects dots across various systems.
In addition to being a SA PMO of the year Judge & coach, Barend is also a qualified Chartered Accountant, Project Management Professional (PMI PMP®) and has completed the Scaling Up Master Class.

Nico van Rooyen

Executive Consultant

In addition to being a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and a Project Management Professional (PMP), Nico is also an astute and results driven business executive, specializing IT Programme and Project Management. Nico has more than 32 years’ experience providing bespoke business solutions.
He is goal-driven, dynamic, and passionate in his dealings with people and business, while being an excellent communicator with well-developed interpersonal skills, which enables his to form trusted relationships with everyone in his network.

Ingrid Pistorius

Operations & Commercials Manager

Ingrid’s primary role is to oversee day-to-day operations within the Colab group — working across departments to make sure that goals are met, team members can collaborate, and everything is running smoothly. Ingrid’s management style is collaborative, and she fosters a positive, open working environment for all clients and employees.

Dawn Hamer

Colab Talent Head of Recruitment and People Care

Dawn leads the recruiting team, guides all recruiting functions, and ensures that our clients’ recruitment burden is lightened, and their needs are matched with candidates of character, competence and chemistry. In addition, Dawn is head of people care, a function she fulfils with the utmost passion and authenticity.
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Our Values

Our actions are guided by core principles we hold dear. Deeply understanding customer needs allows us to address the root cause of their expectations rather than just the symptoms. Taking ownership of “moving the client” and achieving the right results is fundamental to our culture. While sharing “bad news” is often unpopular, being transparent with all information fosters accountability and builds trusted relationships.

Moreover, we value people and our relationships, as demonstrated by our interactions. We engage with everyone openly, honestly, and with a firm yet fair approach.

Satisfied Customers

Heard, understood and served with excellence.

Ownership

Take ownership for the result, not just the activity.

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People

Authentic care for all relationships.

Transparency

Open motives [vulnerability] builds trusted relationships.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you engage with your clients?
We offer a range of engagement options tailored to your needs. Options include modular consultant-led engagements, managed strategic consulting service, project delivery services, as well as project resourcing services for the South African and EMEA business communities. These engagement models can easily be combined or tailored to suit your needs.
Our team is based in South Africa, which aligns closely with EMEA. We align our team’s contractual working hours to that of our clients.
Colab has embraced remote working since 2020. Our aim is to become a natural extension of your team, which works best with regular and real-time communication. This can be through email, Microsoft Teams, phone calls, or other forms of communication that suit you and your team. Additionally, having a consultant who works remotely offers the benefit of increased flexibility and access to a broader talent pool, ensuring you get the best expertise regardless of location.
While our client delivery team is based in South Africa, we regularly visit EMEA to meet with both existing and potential new clients. We always welcome the chance to meet face-to-face, as it helps us build stronger relationships with our clients, in addition to helping us better understand how we can serve you.
We take confidentiality and conflict of interest very seriously. Our employees are bound by individual confidentiality agreements and declarations of interest in their employment contracts with Colab. Additionally, we recommend that our clients have Colab resources sign non-disclosure agreements during their onboarding process when they join the client team as contract resources.
The Colab Best-Practical™ approach is our trademarked framework, and is characterised by simplicity value extraction and light governance suited to the client environment. We take best practices and tailor them to practical use, while we skilfully facilitate the best solution for our client’s needs.
Yes, certainly! We assist you in thinking through your ideas, connecting various elements of your core ideology, business model, value creation model, Go to Market (GTM), operating model, financial model, as well as your capital funding model at the business, team, and individual levels. We employ short, modular engagements to diagnose the current situation, analyze data from existing practices, and co-create conceptual solutions, ultimately generating traction to move the idea to implementation.
Yes, absolutely! Colab specializes in helping businesses to break down their overall strategy into manageable chunks, using our Best-Practical™ prioritization approach and innovation frameworks. Furthermore, Colab will help you execute and deliver the projects and programmes following from the strategy, as well as track the performance of the strategy execution.
For sure! Setting up strategic benefit realization roadmaps, capital funding roadmaps, resource capacity plans, project progress registers and prioritizing projects that will deliver the most business value, is our forte. Also, in addition to delivering projects, Colab also specializes in project performance tracking. We make your project investment performance visible.
At Colab we believe in our Best-Practical™ approach, which is characterized by traction, simplicity, and light governance. This enables you, our client, to execute your strategy faster and reach profitability sooner. Our facilitative approach enables us to lead our clients to unlock benefits as we partner with you through the transformation journey.
Colab was founded on the principle of delivering tangible project results, not just managing project activities. This ethos is embedded in our culture of taking ownership for outcomes, understanding our customers’ needs, being transparent, and caring for people.
We tackle the challenging strategic projects that drive significant organizational change. Our expertise lies in Business Transformation projects, ICT Projects, and Merger & Acquisition projects.
Colab is uniquely positioned to take on tough projects. We bring in our own PMO environment, deploy strong resources, and create structure and traction to achieve project success. This approach means we create some initial discomfort as we move the organization, but the benefits of our methods soon become evident in the integrated team.
At Colab, we use a structured, facilitated approach that sets up challenging projects for success within a month, incorporating all the essential components needed for successful execution. This method is the fastest way to transition a project from stagnation to productive momentum, reducing the lengthy and often painful planning phase.
Yes, certainly! Whether your need is for a large or small business, a strategic portfolio office, a large program office, or an operational project office, Colab can assist. We can create a new PMO, refresh an existing one, or retrofit components as needed. Our PMO-in-a-box offering, or tailored designs, can help you gain traction with your PMO and portfolio of projects.
In addition to specializing in PMO and Project Management roles, such as Programme Managers, Heads of PMO, PMO Managers, PMO Specialists, Project Planners, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Project Administrators, and others, we also specialize in various other IT roles, such as Business Analysts, Process Engineers, Data Engineers, Software Developers, Solutions Architects, Data Analysts, and the like. In short any role that a project needs for a period of time.
Utilizing contract resources allows you, as a business leader, to maintain a flexible, off-payroll workforce that can scale according to your demand needs. This flexibility enables you to focus on driving strategic results. Additionally, contract placements simplify recruitment and help reduce the risk of costly mis-hires.
We offer both contract and permanent placements, depending on our clients’ needs. We also offer a temp-to-perm option.
Our aim is to have a shortlist of top candidates on your desk within 7 days from date of enquiry, then it depends on your internal commercial and interview processes and the availability of the chosen resource. We have placed people within one week but typically it can take between 2 and 7 weeks to place a contractor.
No, Colab handles that for you. We take the stack of CVs off your desk and onto ours. After a thorough screening process, we use our proprietary matching model to send you only the top 3 CVs for the position.
Yes, that is the benefit of the temp-to-perm model. You can start by appointing a resource on contract, and if the individual is a good fit for your company culture and way of working, you can go ahead with a permanent placement.
Simply complete the Contact form below, and one of our managers will contact you shortly. You will experience that it’s easy to do business with Colab.

Contact Us

Contact us for the Best Practical™ solutions you need to enable you to achieve strategic goals, deliver successful projects, and scale project teams effectively.

We work with Corporate Strategy & Innovation teams, Business Transformation teams, Corporate M&A teams, Project Delivery and Execution (PMO) teams, and Strategy & Capability Development consultants seeking innovative strategies, project delivery, and project talent solutions in South Africa and EMEA.

Contact us today to discuss how our team can help you reach new heights.

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