Introduction
At a congress, such as this one, it isn't necessary to demonstrate that projects form an increasing proportion of the work done by organizations today, whether they are in the public, private, or voluntary sector. Projects are simply a very efficient way of getting work done by cross-functional teams of people, whose whole focus is on delivering the product or service that the project has been chartered to create. Unfortunately, the same characteristics that make projects such an efficient means of delivery make them especially challenging as a means of developing organizational capability. Their focus on delivery just doesn't encourage the team to undertake tasks that fall outside the scope of the project, even if those tasks are essential to sustained organizational success.
One such task, essential to the organization but outside the scope of delivery of projects, is the development of a project-capable workforce. How does an organization make sure that it has the right number of people with the right combination of skills to resource the whole portfolio of projects, programs, and other initiatives that are essential to its strategy? After all, ensuring that projects are fully resourced is vital if the projects are to be successful; there is evidence that this is indeed the most important factor in the overall success rates of projects in an organization (Teague & Cooke-Davies, 2007). So, what has to be done to bring about this happy state of affairs? What does “good” look like when it comes to developing a project-capable workforce? That is something that Human Systems has been working to discover for the past five years.
Three Important Concepts
Before telling the story of that voyage of discovery, however, there are three important concepts to understand, each of which represents a potential dilemma for senior management. They could be described as “polarities” in that, like the north and south poles of a magnet, they describe related pairs of activities, both of which are necessary but that can easily appear to be diametrically opposed to each other.
Capability versus Delivery
The first one of these has already been hinted at in the introductory section. It is the dilemma of dedicating resources, and structuring the organization so as to “develop sustainable capability” versus, at the other extreme, creating an organizational architecture to optimize “delivering products and services efficiently and effectively.” Traditionally, in the world of business transaction that has prevailed for much of the twentieth century, this didn't show up as a dilemma. In a standard functionally managed organization (FMO), the line manager responsible for a functional department is responsible for both the development of sustainable functional capability, and for the deployment of resources on particular tasks in order to deliver products and services. In the modern project-based organization (PBO), on the other hand, project teams are tasked with delivery, whereas line managers of functional departments retain responsibility for the development of sustainable capability.
This separation has significant implications for the development of capability, because, typically in a PBO, the project manager has neither the time nor responsibility for developing capability in members of the project team, and the functional line manager is not in a position to know about the capability that his or her resources demonstrate while working on a project. As a result, the PBO's emphasis on delivery tends to come at the expense of developing sustainable capability, as has been shown in high-quality research studies (for example, Hobday, 2000; Davies & Hobday, 2005).This is a dilemma that human resource (HR) specialists in many newly restructured PBOs have not fully come to terms with, and because the HR function has traditionally taken the lead on workforce development programs, this creates difficulties for PBOs. (Huemann, Keegan, & Turner, 2007) (Bredin & Söderlund, 2011) It is also a particular temptation during tough times – shedding delivery people tends to come with a very visible price tag, but freezing or restricting training costs is, in the short term at least, a relatively painless option.
Exploiting versus Learning
The second concept relates to an organization's unique “know how.” In this case, the dilemma is between exploiting existing “know how” in the service of strategic objectives and exploring new knowledge that can form the basis of tomorrow's capabilities. This is the classic dilemma faced by universities: How to balance the teaching of existing knowledge against research that can be expected to generate new knowledge? (Marsh & Hattie, 2002) A number of universities have responded to this dilemma during the past few years by having staff specialize in one or the other, using different criteria to assess performance. In the case of “teachers,” it is their ratings as teachers, whereas in the case of “researchers,” it is the number of papers that are published in highly-rated journals.
In the case of PBOs, it is not so easy to distinguish between exploiting existing knowledge and generating new knowledge, and many organizations struggle to incorporate “lessons learned” on projects into effective organizational “know how” (Jugdev, 2012) (Williams, 2008). In terms of developing the workforce, this has implications for the amount of “training” that forms part of the development, as opposed to the time allocated as formal development that actually encourages the discovery of new and effective practices (e.g., through structures for “learning from experience”).
General versus Specific
The third concept is the extent to which “generic” project management processes and practices are appropriate for an organization, as opposed to the extent to which they need to be tailored and customized to suit the specific context of a particular PBO. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) emphasizes processes that are applicable to “most projects, most of the time,” but one recent substantial study has demonstrated just how significantly processes and practices vary by industry sector and how much they depend upon an organization's strategic drivers (Crawford & Cooke-Davies, 2012). Coupled with the two dilemmas that have already been considered, what this means for the topic of workforce development is that in the face of highly complex, important challenging demands for development, there is a tendency to rely on credentials, such as the Project Management Professional (PMP)® credential as a recruitment criterion for new project managers, and external training programs (either “out of the box” or somewhat customized) as the basis for development.
Another variant of the same dilemma relates to which part of the project community is to be developed: Is it right to focus on immersing a large number of entry-level project- and work-package managers in generic project management principles, or should the emphasis be on the elite top group that manages the companies most complex and business critical programs and projects?
Finding out What “Good” Looks Like
When we started on our voyage of discovery, of course, we did not appreciate the role that these three polarities play in creating challenges for PBOs. This appreciation came later. Indeed, the journey itself started with a question asked almost casually.
Dubai, November 2007
Approximately 35 people from 20 organizations were attending a Human Systems workshop in Dubai, dealing with the topic of “Optimizing Capacity and Managing Complexity.” Senior managers responsible for the project function in global companies in the aerospace, telecommunications, finance, banking, pharmaceutical, transportation, and energy sectors worked through five questions: What is the nature of complexity in projects that makes so-called ‘complex projects' more difficult to manage than other projects? What are the specific skills required of the managers of projects with a high degree of complexity? How can an organization be sure it will have sufficient people with the right level of skill to deliver the projects and programs necessary to implement its chosen strategy and how can an organization develop these people? How can it take people who are competent to manage ‘painting by numbers' projects, and develop the necessary skills and abilities to manage and lead projects with a high degree of complexity? And what else is necessary in order to deliver the portfolio of projects and programs that is required by the organization's strategy?
During the latter stages of the workshop, as the answers that emerged to these five questions began to show just how challenging the topic of workforce development is, the head of the Shell Project Academy approached Human Systems, and asked whether we could conduct an exercise to benchmark Project Academies, because he wanted to understand how his organization compared with other leading companies.
Rijswijk, September 2008
Over the next few months, organizations in Europe and North America who were known to have an interest in Project Academies were canvased for their interest in the project, and a single-topic workshop was hosted by Shell in Rijswijk in the Netherlands. The workshop was attended by approximately 40 people from 25 organizations that either had something that they called a “Project Academy,” or were interested in starting one. Prior to the event, all participants had been surveyed so as to understand the scope of what each company did, and the focus of the workshop was to share experiences, both good and bad, in order to identify what constitutes good practice in this field.
It turned out that what organizations called a “Project Academy” varied from a one-week course for selected project managers (a global telecoms company) through cooperative ventures with one or more universities, sometimes offering master's degrees, to a complete and well-integrated project-capable workforce development program organizations, such as Shell and NASA.
Developing an Assessment Instrument
Following this workshop, there was sufficient interest for a working party to be established, with representatives from Shell, NASA, Fujitsu Systems, Bombardier Transportation, Rolls Royce, and SITA. Guided by a facilitator from Human Systems who drew on the company's twenty years experience of benchmarking organizational project management, this team created a set of questions, both qualitative and quantitative, that were then incorporated into a purpose-built assessment instrument that could be used to record both scores for each question and the evidence of actual practice used and then to produce a graphical output comparing organizations with each other.
Since then, the instrument has been used with a dozen organizations to drive improvements, many of them for a second time to monitor progress, and the results have been discussed in four subsequent workshops, one in North America, two in Europe, and one in Australia. This is the basis for the information contained in this paper.
More Complex than you Might Think
You might be able to glean from the three concepts that were presented earlier in this paper that the challenge of developing and maintaining a project-capable workforce is a complex one, with many separate aspects, each of which interacts with all the others, often in complex ways. The paragraphs that follow each introduce a broad area about which decisions have to be made, briefly describe the kinds of challenges that organizations face in that area, and then provide examples of good practices that have been observed. There is no suggestion that every organization needs to adopt all of the practices described, but the fact that some organizations have found them to be effective means of developing their workforces does suggest that should be food for thought.
Who is Included in the Project-capable Workforce?
It may sound like an obvious question, but it is one that challenges many organizations. Projects are delivered by people in many roles: project managers, project controls specialists, work package managers, project team members, sub-contractors, owners, sponsors, suppliers, and consultants — the list can be a very long one. Most organizations provide some kind of training for project managers (either in-house, or through the provision of external training courses), but for many, it stops there. Increasingly, over the past few years, the scope has been extended to include people who form an integral part of the project management effort, such as engineering team leaders in engineering organizations or leaders of functional sub-teams in pharmaceutical R&D. Sponsors represent a particular challenge for development, because they generally face barriers either of a practical nature (they are often senior managers and very busy), of a psychological nature (they can see themselves as being too senior for any kind of training activity) or of understanding (they simply do not see themselves as being a part of the project delivery effort).
Organizations that score highly in this regard demonstrate a number of good practices. Perhaps the most important (and one of the rarest) is some form of resource planning model, which relates the anticipated demands of the project portfolio to the availability of people for specific roles. Since the use of portfolio management practices is one of the key predictors of overall benefits delivered from a project portfolio (Crawford & Cooke-Davies, 2012), it would seem fairly safe to say that this particular practice offers tangible and substantial financial benefits. Closely related to it is the use of competency frameworks to assess whether or not people are competent to fulfill particular project roles. At a minimum, good practice dictates that each role has a clear definition of the capabilities that are required for it, along with a structured career path for members of the project management community. The most senior of the development programs in such organizations tend to be by invitation only, to high-flying members of the community who have been earmarked for leadership roles on the organization's most significant projects and programs.
Project work is, by its nature, very different from “business as usual” (Cooke-Davies, 2009), even though terms like “planning” and “risk” are in common use in both contexts. To protect against the risks inherent in this, project management needs a “voice” in decision making around the top table, and organizations that understand the importance of developing a project-capable workforce also seem to have project management representation at the board level. Similarly, the C-suite of such organizations tends to include people who are themselves quite capable of leading substantial projects and programs.
What Sort of Development to Provide?
The second kind of decision concerns what could be called the “development curriculum” and how to deliver it. Decisions about this inevitably depend on decisions about who is included in the workforce to be developed. The nature of topics to be included, for example, depends on the project roles that are catered for. Once the “audience” (so to speak) has been identified, however, there are further choices involving the breadth and depths of topics to be included in the curriculum; for example, are there specific programs for project controls people, or are they included in general planning programs? Who is to provide the development (external trainers, in-house experts, or some combination of the two)? Who develops and assures the quality of the programs? What media are to be used (classroom-based, self-paced e-learning, or some combination of the two)? And are development programs to be supported by accreditation (internal or external)? The term “curriculum” is used here to mean much more than simply the content of training courses or educational programs: it also refers to the development that takes place through structured activities that encourage or stimulate “learning from experience.”
Organizations near to the top in these areas show that they devote considerable effort and care to such decisions. If your organization supports a community of hundreds or thousands of project managers, then there are substantial cost and resource implications. It would appear that there is increasing recognition of the need for accreditation. External accreditation, such as the Project Management Professional (PMP)® credential, and the whole suite of Project Management Institute (PMI) credentials provide a useful external benchmark, although many organizations supplement this with internal licensing of project managers to more senior ranks internally. Where such licensing schemes exist, there is sometimes a core curriculum of specific events that must be attended as a precondition for promotion. It is also apparent that different organizations strike a different balance within the overall program, depending upon their own strategic focus. For some, this may mean a heavy emphasis on supporting a very large number of people in obtaining project management credentials, such as the APMP or PMP®. For others, it may mean concentrating more on the elite directors of megaprojects.
Among the more advanced organizations, there is an impressive use of new media to improve the effectiveness of training. E-learning, for example, can be used to assure that delegates to a compulsory core classroom course have done the necessary pre-work and passed an online knowledge test so that the whole cohort can gain full benefit from their time together. Similarly, visit the impressive NASA website section on multimedia (Google NASA APPEL and choose Knowledge Sharing/Multimedia), to see the range of programs available on YouTube and iTunes U. Indeed, NASA's academy can stake a credible claim to being the longest established “project academy,” with the Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership and its predecessors being more than twenty years old. NASA is also leading the way in its recognition that, since projects are delivered by teams, developing individuals is less effective than developing the whole project team (Pellerin, 2009). A final factor about the curriculum that distinguishes high-scoring from low-scoring organizations is an ability to flex the curriculum at short notice in response to changing business needs. This requires the unit responsible for workforce development both to be in close and constructive dialogue with senior managers who are responsible for the delivery of strategy and business results and to have the means at their disposal to add and subtract elements from the curriculum as dictated by business priorities.
What about Knowledge?
Any curriculum, of course, is based on knowledge, so the third area calling for decisions is the relationship between workforce development and knowledge management. On what knowledge is the curriculum to be based? How can “lessons learned” from project experience be fed back into the development program? What is the role of professional organizations such as PMI? What about standards? What use should be made of universities and research into the field of project management? To a certain extent, decisions about these topics are dependent on decisions about the extent of the workforce to be developed, and the curriculum for their development. But there is also a feedback loop — decisions about knowledge will have an influence on the curriculum. For example, if an organization bases its processes and methods on an external standard, such as that contained in the PMBOK® Guide or the new ISO 21500, then these will need to be reflected in the curriculum in some way.
It is perhaps not surprising that high-scoring organizations have strong links with both professional associations and universities. In some cases, universities are involved in developing and delivering advanced courses, drawing upon their latest research. In others, organizations are themselves represented on universities' research communities so as to both understand the results of recent research, and also to influence what research is undertaken by the universities. As far as professional associations are concerned, high-scoring organizations have strong links through corporate membership, active participation in business roundtable discussions, such as those organized for PMI's Global Executive Council, the encouragement of external accreditation of project managers, and the accreditation of courses in the curricula by professional associations. The need for relevance in the organization's own context is met by internal subject matter experts (SMEs), who have the final say over the content and delivery of each curriculum element. Ideally, these are the same SMEs who are responsible for the organization's internal standards and methods (e.g., process owners), so that changes to the one are simultaneously mirrored in the other.
Administering the Effort
What should be one of the most straightforward aspects of workforce development frequently turns out to be anything but!! With the involvement of HR (maintenance of personnel records), project management (administration and logistics in connection with delivering the curriculum) and business units (release of personnel to attend curriculum events, and tracking costs associated with attendance), records and systems all too often are fragmented and incomplete. Even in the highest scoring organizations, considerable development activity with its associated cost is authorized at the departmental level, and thus remains invisible to those accountable for workforce development.
Higher scoring organizations achieve a degree of integration between personnel records on the one hand (who has attended what programs, and achieved what step in his or her career) and curriculum records on the other (how often programs have been run, where, for what business units, and attended by whom). When functioning smoothly, such systems allow discussions between project management and business management about the effective direction of the curriculum toward business objectives. They also allow effective support to be provided for alumni of programs, so that the alumni network increasingly resembles the whole project community.
The loop can be closed effectively on administration when the curriculum element development and approval system includes clear criteria for outcomes to be achieved and the details of how they are to be measured. If the program records are set up with this information already integrated, then the logistics information can also contain information about the outcomes achieved each time the element is delivered, thereby validating (or not, as the case may be) the principles on which the business case was formulated.
Assessing how Effective the Effort has been
That bring us neatly to the final area calling for decisions — how to assess the effectiveness of the development effort and its individual elements. This is the area in which organizations generally struggle the most. A widely accepted language for discussing the assessment of events designed to provide development in the form of knowledge sharing, training, or education is the Kirkpatrick scale of measures. This consists of measures at four levels. Level 1 is the reaction of the student to the event or program — what he or she thought and felt about the event. Sometimes called the “instant happiness” score, most organizations keep track of this score for most events, frequently setting a threshold score that any particular event is required to achieve. Level 2 is measures of learning that has taken place — the increase in knowledge or capability that results from the event or program. This can be measured by tests administered at the end of the event, or even by observed case study discussions during the event. High scoring organizations have such measures built into their events as a matter of course. These first two levels lie within the control of the development organization.
As the levels increase, however, so do other departments become involved, and effective measurement becomes more problematic. Level 3 measures behavior — the extent of improvement in behavior and/or capability and the extent to which it has been applied. This involves linking the specific curriculum element to subsequent behavior applied to specific projects, and thus involves assessment by project managers and quite possibly functional managers, as well as links to the employee's own personnel records in terms of personal development objectives and the like. This level is only occasionally being implemented consistently for the whole workforce. Some of the high-scoring organizations accomplish this for some of their curriculum elements, but none manage it for the majority of the development program. Level 4 is generally written off as “too hard.” This is the level that measures results — the effects on the business or environment resulting from improvements in the trainee's performance. Indeed, so difficult is this to accomplish, that it is argued in development circles, that perhaps Kirkpatrick is the wrong place to start (Bellinger, 2011). Certainly there is evidence of this from the one organization that, for a number of years, employed a measurement specialist to work with business units and produce a six-monthly measurement report that described what key performance indicators (KPIs) would be monitored to assure the effectiveness of the development program.
Conclusions: Developing Strategic Capability
Over the three years that we have now been “benchmarking” the development of program and project-capable workforces in large organizations, there is evidence that even in the current prolonged straightened financial circumstances that many organizations find themselves in, they are pressing forward with the application of good practice to this critical area.
Before we close this discussion, perhaps two questions are in order, before we close this discussion. The first is a question about organizational architecture. Who “owns” the process of developing a project-capable workforce? All too often the answer is: “everybody and nobody.” Certainly business units, HR, and the project management function each have a contribution to make, and workforce development is typically “owned” by HR in functionally managed organizations. A good case can be made, however, for suggesting that the project management function should be if not the actual “owner,” then at the very least a “demanding customer” of the HR department.
The second refers back to the three concepts that were introduced at the beginning of this paper. We have seen that good practice exists for developing the workforce, and this is entirely consistent with the findings of PMI's major research, discussed in Researching the Value of Project Management, which concludes that to obtain value from their investments in project management, organizations need to continually invest in maintenance and development. (Thomas & Mullaly, 2008)
However, the emphasis appears to be much more on exploiting generic knowledge to deliver programs and projects than it is on learning new and specific capabilities that can provide the basis for future competition or improvements in efficiency. If the four-step cycle in Exhibit 1 has merit, then perhaps we should see the task not only in terms of the first two steps, but recognize the critical role in sustainable development of capability played by the third and fourth steps.
Exhibit 1 – Workforce Development as Strategic Capability Development