A great team of managers with varied project management skills and a good understanding of the core methodologies involved—it's every organization's dream of the team necessary to ongoing success. To recruit, develop and retain stellar managers, some global organizations have gone so far as to establish a formal project management career track. These match classroom training, on-the-job experience and demonstrated competence to promotions and salary increases. They emphasize hard skills, not just communication, as well as negotiation, risk management and organizational methodologies to keep project managers motivated and corporate projects on track.
It's an emerging trend: The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is scheduled to start its project management career path in December 2002; Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, New York, NY, USA, has placed its technology consultants on a project management career path since the two organizations merged almost two years ago; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has spent almost 15 years developing and refining the program now known as the Academy of Program and Project Leadership.
“Our goal is to improve our performance on projects by better training and equipping project managers.”
—THAD KONOPNICKI,
DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
A New Career Development Program
The DoE is trying to learn from the experience at NASA and other organizations to establish its own Project Management Career Development Program. The agency started the program on 17 January 2001 and is scheduled to begin implementation by 1 December 2002. “We're treating this just like a project,” says Thad Konopnicki, deputy director of the DoE's Environmental Management project management office, Washington, D.C., USA, in describing the structure of the task force and the milestones it has established. “If we're going to talk the talk, we're going to walk the walk.”
“Our goal is to improve our performance on projects by better training and equipping our project managers,” says Konopnicki. He is also concerned with employee retention. Not only are private contractors who do business with the agency interested in recruiting agency insiders, but also a large number of DoE employees will become eligible for retirement in the next decade. A project management career path is one way that the agency may be able to retain key project managers while effectively training those who will follow them (see sidebar: “Retaining Your Stars”).
“Much of our work is accomplished through projects,” says Bruce M. Carnes, DoE Office of Management director. “In fact, our project managers are currently responsible for over 100 projects with a total value in excess of $20 billion, plus another $150 billion in environmental restoration work over the next several decades. It's important for us to make sure that our project managers have the best skills possible, and that each person is treated as a critical DoE asset. Therefore, we need a cohesive career management plan to develop them, match their skills with assignments, track their performance and reward them as appropriate.”
Konopnicki's experience is instructive to those who want to establish a career path in their organization. After setting up a task force with people from inside and outside the agency, he then had to identify who at the DoE qualified as a project manager. After all, employees throughout the country run projects but have a variety of titles. The task force then started benchmarking and designing the career path itself.
RETAINING YOUR STARS
NASA doesn't have a big problem recruiting the best and brightest people for its jobs. If you really are a rocket scientist, it's pretty much where you've wanted to work since you were born. Even those who didn't quite get as far as astrophysics are attracted to the whole idea of the space program.
The problem is how to keep these people. One advantage of a career track for retention purposes is that it defines milestones that may have salary increases and bonuses attached. At Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, for example, internal project management certifications correspond to advances in title, which in turn carry increases in compensation. Project managers start at the senior consultant level and can progress to program director.
Thad Konopnicki of the DoE also has retention in mind as he and his task force design their project management program. Along with the hope that “as people move up the levels, they'd be eligible for assignment on bigger, tougher projects,” thus making the job more attractive, his team plans to tie retention bonuses and increased salary rates to levels of program participation. “We envision a formal certification program,” he says. In a DoE benchmarking study, the agency found that a relationship between certification programs and human resources dramatically increased the likelihood of success.
Having a certification program in place seems to be a key step. At NASA and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, there is an in-house system of coursework, job experience and demonstrated expertise that employees must show as they progress along the career path. With such a formal program in place, logical milestones can be matched with salary and title increases.
The DoE's project management team includes Randall Inouy, acting principal deputy, Office of Engineering and Construction Management; David Burford, team lead, Professional Development Team, PMCDP Task Force; Thad Konopnicki, deputy director, Office of Project Management, Office of Environmental Management; Richard Couture, member of the PMCDP Task Force; and Saralyn Bunch, team lead, Needs, Inventory, & Support Team, PMCDP Task Force.
PHOTOS BY CURTIS BOGGS
“We've designed the program in draft,” Konopnicki says. “Now we need to look at what courses are out there and what programs are available off the shelf, then figure out what we need to develop internally.” Under consideration are Project Management Institute (PMI®) programs, university courses and partnerships, training from private contractors and an in-house curriculum.
Professions Program Offers Career Paths
In May 2000, Ernst & Young transferred its consulting operations to Cap Gemini, creating a global management and technology consulting firm known as Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. As part of the merger, a new organizational structure was established. It is aligned along six distinct professions: strategic consulting, business consulting, technology, operations, business development and enabling professions such as financial management and communications. “We had a huge foundation to build on in the Americas from Ernst & Young,” says Julia Anderson, vice president, Americas Technology Profession Touchpoint, Bellevue, Wash., USA. “But the professions were a new thing brought in to knit together this global organization.” That was important if employees were to be retained and clients were to see the benefits of the merger.
Within the technology profession are three career paths:
- Advise, for those handling information technology strategy
- Create, for those who design and build new systems
- Lead, the project management track, which covers how consultants run engagements to deliver the services, manage the team and build the client relationship.
The DoE's Environmental Management Division performs a variety of projects, and a project management career track helps develop the best leaders. Above, Thad Konopnicki, Bruce M. Carnes, Office of Management director, and James A. Rispoli, Office of Engineering acting director, help direct DoE projects.
Employees enter these career paths at the senior consultant level and can progress through to program director, a vice president-level title. “A big component of our training is on the job,” Anderson says, “but we absolutely train on the fundamentals of project management. We do simulations of issues that come up, train on risk management policy and procedures, and teach quality control and measurement.” Cap Gemini Ernst & Young has its own in-house boards, made up of practitioners from their offices worldwide, who examine employees' experience and track records to certify them to handle projects with varying budgets, staffing levels and cross-border interaction.
In addition, the firm relies heavily on mentorships, both as a way to train staff and to recognize excellent project managers. “The kind of people who like being consultants like being mentors,” Anderson says. “You can certainly schedule and set procedures, but the rest comes from on-the-job training.” Mentorships, she has found, support aspiring project managers as they work on client project engagements.
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young is a global organization, and careers and professions are designed to be uniform in all offices. Anderson notes that one issue is matching business card titles with steps on each career path, as the titles that clients expect to see and that consultants prefer to use may be different in different countries. Internally, however, the system is standard. The firm has established a Center for Engagement and Project Management, which endorses and supports PMI's Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification but which also has internal milestones. “We train people how to deliver and measure out our own level of quality,” Anderson says. “We have in-house boards that look at proven experience and track records to certify people at our own levels.” These boards have members from Cap Gemini Ernst & Young offices worldwide; one of the issues they are looking at is a project manager's ability to handle cross-border projects.
PHOTO BY CURTIS BOGGS (LEFT); DOE PHOTOS
Academy of Program and Project Leadership
After the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the leadership at NASA realized the need to develop people who knew how to handle complex projects, and that the necessary tools and skills must be identified so that they could be taught to future generations of NASA leaders.
The result is a commitment to project management throughout the organization. “Project management is what we do,” says Ed Hoffman, Director of the NASA Academy of Program Project Leadership, Washington, D.C., USA. “We have challenging missions that have to meet a cost profile and time line, and that requires a variety of disciplines. The NASA mindset sees the project approach as the way to do business. Our folks would be confused by a functional approach.” The Academy trains NASA employees and interested outsiders in how to manage ambitious projects where success is critical. While it does not explicitly support the PMP certification track, the program isn't antithetical to PMI standards either.
“We do simulations of issues that come up, train on risk management policy and procedures, and teach quality control and measurement.”
—JULIA ANDERSON,
VICE-PRESIDENT, AMERICAS TECHNOLOGY PROFESSION TOUCHPOINT, CAP GEMINI ERNST & YOUNG
The NASA Academy starts with four levels of classroom training, based on the employees' seniority. The first level of training is for team members, so it involves people who will be working on projects. Those who manage them continue into higher levels of the program. Level one covers both the basics of managing a project, including structure, breakdown and risk management. In addition, it emphasizes organizational knowledge and effectiveness. Hoffman says there must be a context; unless a manager understands how the organization works, it will be impossible to get the project launched.
Dramatic changes in technology alone make the classroom process important. Without proper training, for example, managers may not be able to use Web-based and other collaborative tools effectively. This is a major focus of the current incarnation of the program, one that led to its revamp.
Blazing a Career Path
The DoE's experiment shows a route that larger organizations can take to establishing a project management career track. A need is identified, benchmarks and milestones are created, and people within the organization commit to the development of such a personnel program. Then, a suitable mixture of training, experience, occupational titles, evaluation methods and compensation is created to meet the needs of the organization and its people. There's no one way to do it, but, unfortunately, it sometimes is easier to gain buy-in after a major crisis, as at NASA with the Challenger explosion, or during a major reorganization, such as the merger between Ernst & Young's consulting business and Cap Gemini. After all, this represents a fundamental change in the way business is done and project managers are compensated. Without stress, the organization might not be ready to buy into a dramatic change.
Smaller companies may have trouble setting up an organized career path for a handful of project managers, but that doesn't mean that they can't benefit from some of these tools. Smaller organizations can promote professional growth by encouraging individuals to take courses at local colleges and through training companies.
Organizations of all sizes may consider adopting a mentorship program as a way of formalizing project management development short of implementing a career path. It's a way of recognizing those with demonstrated talent, forcing them to stretch in their chosen career by taking on new responsibility, and passing their knowledge to the next generation of leaders. PM
Ann C. Logue is a freelance business writer based in Chicago. She has written for Barron's, Training & Development and WetFeet.com, among other publications.