Developing Project Management Potential

Why our current approach at developing project manager is ineffective

In the last article in this series – Developing Project Management Potential Part 1 – we looked at the range of competencies it takes to be a great project manager. In this article I cover how we currently develop project managers and why this approach can be ineffective.

Globally there are two main project management accreditation routes – the Project Management Institute’s range of accreditations and Prince2. Both are worth studying. Prince2 gives a best practice management framework consisting of roles, responsibilities, processes and management documents. A thorough understanding of this framework enables a manager to analyse a project and see what’s missing. Getting qualified in the Prince2 Practitioner Certificate is a good start in developing project management competency – but it is only a start. As we saw in the previous article, knowledge of best practice is only one of the range of competencies needed for project management.

I have seen many organisations send their staff on a 5-day Prince2 Practitioner Certification course and assume they will come out the other end as professional project managers. This is simply not true. Firstly the accreditation is badly named – Practitioner does not mean you practice Prince2, just that you passed an exam. Secondly the courses are intense and the Prince2 framework is large, if the candidates don’t get back to work and immediately start using the method, they will quickly forget it. Thirdly if they return to work and their environment doesn’t use Prince2, it is a difficult battle to get a workplace to take on the ideas and concepts – especially if they are not supported in such an initiative. This means that for many people, the great ideas they learnt on the course are quickly forgotten and the organisation gets little benefit from the training.

The other accreditation route is with the Project Management Institute. Their Project Management Professional (PMP) certification has two advantages over Prince2. Firstly you need to have shown at least 4,500 hours of project management experience. Secondly the PMP syllabus is more wide ranging, covering areas such as people management and financial management as well as process best practice. However PMP and Prince2 work well in tandem as PMP’s process model is fairly lightweight compared to the detail of Prince2’s.

The weakness of both Prince2 and PMP is that they rely on a training and examination approach to develop skills. Research has continually shown that this is very ineffective at leading to improvements in business results. Most organisations focus on whether courses get good evaluations from attendees or whether the exam results were high. Whereas what we are really interested in, from an organisational level, is whether people came off the course and improved their behaviour on the job and whether this led to improvement in business results. A report by Detterman and Sternberg showed that most training does not led to improvements in business indicators.

Why is training so ineffective? I think there are a multitude of reasons for this. Most are to do with a lack of focus on what happens after the training. Without effective follow up to support the trainees in applying the theory and setting explicit targets for new behaviours and better results, most of the great ideas from the training lie untouched in training manuals gathering dust. A better approach is management training plus coaching over a longer period of time. This helps managers to embed new approaches and behaviours. The training takes care of teaching new ideas and trying them out in a safe classroom environment and the coaching takes care of taking these perfect theories and applying them to the messy, difficult world of reality.

In part 3 of this series I will look at the principles of coaching as a development approach and how it differs from training.