Sometimes chaotic and often complex, the project environment is no place for the meek. Rather, it is home to project managers who somehow routinely navigate changing schedules, budgets and scopes.
“As human beings, we like to create order,” says Janice Thomas, Ph.D., director for the MBA program in project management at Athabasca University's Centre for Innovative Management in St. Albert, Alberta, Canada. “We like to manage and control. When you manage projects you learn very quickly, there's no order or control.” Ms. Thomas and her colleagues set out to study the influence of three complexity-related theories on the development of project managers. “Our research looked at how current project management educational programs are addressing increasingly complex and uncertain environments,” Ms. Thomas says.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
➜ Few education and training programs instill mastery in project management in today's complex environments.
➜ Establishing mentoring programs and career paths dedicated to project management drives project managers toward master levels.
➜ In order for an organization to excel, upper management must fully support the project management discipline and development programs.
➜ Master project managers lead change through cooperation in complex, dynamic environments where knowledge is shared.
These theories are making inroads in natural sciences and are starting to be applied in management sciences. They are:
∎ Chaos theory, which concerns the behavior of dynamic but unstable systems over time
∎ Dissipative structures, which examines the dynamic between stability and instability
∎ Complex adaptive systems, which consists of a large number of independent agents, each capable of behaving according to unique principles of interaction and relation.
Ms. Thomas and her colleagues considered how these concepts apply to stable and unstable environments but focused on the boundary between the zones. “It's a non-linear approach to the world,” she says, “the implications of which apply to what is being taught in this area for project management.” The study also drew on the classic medieval guild model of apprentice, journeyman and master levels of knowledge.
Formalizing existing mentor relationships and forming new ones cultivates master-level project managers.
The research concluded that educational models supporting continuous change and creative thinking are needed for project managers to achieve master levels of knowledge. “It's about being able to think critically, having the thought process and comparative skills,” Ms. Thomas says.
➜The Athabasca researchers concluded that the vast majority of PMI’s Registered Education Providers (R.E.P.s), as well as university educational programs on project management, fail to address the complex work environment to train and educate master-level project managers fully. “From Internet data, it appears only 8 percent of the thousands of project management training courses we looked at really dealt with complexity and managing projects at a master level,” Ms. Thomas says. Similarly, a review of 12 advanced university courses in project management found less than a handful of programs addressed complexity issues.
“The Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) training and most university courses are focused on apprentice to journeyman,” Ms. Thomas says. “People haven't thought beyond this. In many complex projects, linear managing isn't going to be very helpful.”
In the corporate environment, few companies formally prepare project managers for mastery. For example, the power and petrochemical industries, based on globalization and sheer complexity of projects, are leaders in delivering and teaching project management. Project managers don't always get the training they need to operate in these high-performance project environments, but companies are working to remedy the situation.
Prompted by geographical expansion, the addition of new business units and an increase in capital spending, Calgary, Alberta-based Petro-Canada, one of Canada's largest integrated oil and gas companies, reengineered its project management process two years ago. “We realized we were lacking in three areas: project management depth, a good ladder process for career advancement and a common process for project management,” says Gordon Rankin, manager of facilities engineering for Petro-Canada's North American gas unit.
Mr. Rankin and six other Petro-Canada employees formed a team to standardize how the company approaches project management. “We knew we needed to speak the same language and manage our activity in a singular process regardless of business unit or location. So we set about to select the best components of our own process and looked at best practices of others in our industry,” he says. The due diligence helped Petro-Canada shape its project management methodology last year into a standardized process called “PM@PC,” which is based upon five critical gateways:
1. Identify Opportunities
2. Make a Selection on the Options Available
3. Define the Project
4. Execute the Project
5. Handover, Closeout and Learnings.
Training was essential to inculcate Petro-Canada's new process companywide. Petro-Canada teamed with an outside firm to develop workshops, including a three-day program specifically designed for project managers and a one-day seminar for those with peripheral involvement with project delivery. Seeking feedback from a consultancy was essential “to give us an external view on project management,” Mr. Rankin says. To date, more than 500 global employees, from administrators to vice presidents, have benefited from the training sessions.
Work in Progress
Performance reviews and processes at Petro-Canada incorporate the fundamentals of PM@PC. “We evaluate and do periodic reviews and audit checks for compliance to the model and level of results,” Mr. Rankin says. Knowledge sharing is at the heart of the methodology. “One of the hallmarks of any successful organization is being able to learn from a project and share the information. So we are implementing a standardized database to share information at project closeout and to circulate and share that learning.”
A new multiyear project by Petro-Canada is putting the new PM@PC model to the test. After planning for more than a year, Petro-Canada has started converting a large oil refinery in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to handle a variety of synthetic crude products. “The new model has more roots in business areas such as this, where there's more risk involved,” Mr. Rankin says.
➜The reengineering of project management at Petro-Canada, Mr. Rankin emphasizes, is a work in progress. This year, the focus is defining career paths and instituting a mentoring program. “We're currently mapping out career plans with employees so that people understand where they can move up in a project environment, from beginner to expert,” he says. Formalizing existing mentor relationships and forming new ones cultivates master-level project managers. “The intention is to start via our Intranet and then go to a one-to-one basis,” Mr. Rankin says, noting that technologies such as videoconferencing facilitate the process. All of the project management-related programs are being incorporated into employee workplans and reviews.
| It's about being able to think critically, having the thought process and comparative skills. |
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| Janice Thomas, Ph.D., Director, MBA Program, Athabasca Univ. Centre for Innovative Management, St. Albert, Alberta, Canada |
➜Mr. Rankin concedes the biggest challenge at Petro-Canada has been getting the standardized model in place. But a close second, he says, was winning management's buy-in at all levels. “We have achieved our executive leadership's support; however, engagement of business delivery leaders can be a challenge. We engage them from time to time to assist us in getting our messages back to the organization. This was initiated when we held a cross-company forum with all the executive team in attendance.”
Getting Certified
Similarly, Zurich, Switzerland-based ABB Group, a leader in power and automation technologies with operations in more than 100 countries, revamped its project management methodologies several years ago to incorporate industry best practices.
Jim Triompo, group senior vice president of process area project management for ABB in Raleigh, N.C., USA, says overhauling its methodologies sparked the idea to develop a customized project management training and certification program across ABB‘s global operations. “We teamed with ESI International and George Washington University, selecting programs from their curriculums and adding some of our own modules to develop four levels of ABB project management certification,” he says. These four levels are:
1. Associate Project Manager: For non-complex domestic projects; uses ABB standard terms and conditions with proven technology
2. Project Manager: Some degree of complexity, works on domestic or international projects; may entail using non-standard terms and conditions and system solutions with established and new product offerings
3. Senior Project Manager: Large complex projects, domestic or international; most certified at this level have PMI’s Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential.
4. Company Senior Project Manager: Minimum 10 years experience managing large complex international projects; often works with consortium partners.
“Our ABB training, launched in February 2003, complements the PMP [credential] and adds ABB-specific modules, including review of case studies and lessons learned,” Mr. Triompo says. Depending on the training level and modules, employees take training online or in week-long sessions held regionally by ABB. Of ABB‘s two major divisions, its power technologies unit is more than 60 percent complete for initial certification training. Training for its automated technologies division started this year and continues through 2006. “Then it's on to recertification and [adding] new levels. It's a continuous learning cycle,” he says.
➜Each year, ABB conducts a global seminar for close to 50 senior-level project managers to share knowledge, examine lessons learned and learn from external speakers. Mr. Triompo says the attendees find this open sharing of knowledge invaluable, noting that one participant leads a team of project managers on the world's largest dam project, the Three Gorges hydroelectric power plant project which is 44 km (27.34 miles) from Yichang, China.
Ms.Thomas says the knowledge-sharing practiced by ABB and Petro-Canada is illustrative of the double-loop learning required to develop master project managers: Errors are detected and corrected in ways that involve the modification of an organization's underlying policies and objectives. “An example is a situation where a where a project office learns from experience and decides to modify its underlying project management methodology in response to this learning,” she says. PM
Marcia Jedd is a Minneapolis, Minn., USA-based supply chain and business writer.
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