Project management

Abstract

Project management, as an emerging profession, is expanding into most countries of the world, including the countries of the Gulf Corporation Council–Arabian Peninsula. This paper builds on the work of the lead author, which was published as part of the proceedings of the 2004 PMI Global Congress – Europe and on the actual experience of implementing some of the ideas that were discussed in the 2004 paper. This paper will focus on implementing a multi-faceted professional employee development program for the employees of an organization that is responsible to execute a substantial capital program; more the 1 billion US$. We will highlight the lead author's observations, encountered challenges, and the normal resistance to change.

Introduction

The focus of this paper is on a program that was initiated around June of 2002 as the result of an employee satisfaction survey, which was conducted the year before.

Background

Late in 2001, the organization that is the subject of this paper conducted an employee satisfaction survey. The result of the survey was quite unsatisfactory; less than 60% overall satisfaction. As an essential part of the survey the employees had an opportunity to provide their specific concerns. A good percent of the employees concerns were related to performance appraisal, employee development, training, among other factors. The root causes of the concerns were mostly due to the perceived lack of opportunities or unfair distribution of the available opportunities. To address these concerns, the lead author of this paper was entrusted with the development of a program that will help improve employee satisfaction. The objective of the program was to address general employee satisfaction challenges, but focus on the major concerns that were related to development and training.

Initial Steps

In mid 2002, the lead author facilitated a workshop, with the purpose of identifying opportunities for improvements. Although the focus was supposed to be employee satisfaction only, we expended the charter of the workshop to include other project execution and performance improvements ideas. The reason we expanded the scope because we had believed that issues related to project execution were a contributing factors to the employees general concern and we wanted to initiate a process where professional employees had an opportunity to impact and influence the way we conducted our business. For this workshop, we invited about 25% of the employees of this organization and we insisted on a mix of experience; the workshop included the top person in charge of this organization, all project managers, and representatives sample of the organization personnel, including the most junior level positions. This workshop was very effective, and through the brainstorming sessions we were able to identify many ideas that we could consider for implementation; one of which was an employee development program; the focus of this paper.

Constraints

Shortly after this workshop, the organization's manager established a continuous excellence team and asked the lead author of this paper to facilitate the working of this team. In addition, a small team was organized to develop the desired employee development program. This team had to deals with many constraints, such as:

•      Developing this employee development program in a very short time; less than 2 months

•      We did not have any budget beside our own time

•      Due to the short time span, we did not have an opportunity to consult with other organizations (internal or external) or try to identify international practices in this area

•      One more constraints we had to deal with, was the need to identify and understand some other initiatives that were being considered for implementation by other organizations within our company, in order not to duplicate the effort.

Limitations

In addition to the pre-defined constraints, we were faced with post initiation limitations, such as:

•      The team did not have enough power to implement many of the ideas that we were coming up with since they were outside the influence of our immediate management “organization”. Further, at that time our management did not feel the need or desire to pursue these challenging opportunities with upper management.

•      After we completed the draft of a comprehensive program that was long term focused, we were asked to scale it back since there was a need “for immediate gratification” and we had to revise our program to focus on short term gains in the interest of maximum benefits.

Resulting Program

Program Basic Principles

The resulting program was built around some of the concepts and principles that we had identified in the 2004 paper (Ajam, 2004). These include:

1.      Emphasis the importance of the individuals in taking a lead for their careers, or at least be involved

2.      Program is built on the concept of The Four Stages of Careers (Dalton & Thompson 1986)

3.      Development program has to be competency based

4.      Balancing the need for on-the-job and classroom training

5.      Balancing the need of short term focus with the desire for long term “career path concept”

6.      Implement a system to ensure implementation of the development program

7.      Emphasis that the employee development process should be transparent

8.      Incorporate the concept of “Learning Organization” and focus on knowledge sharing

Program General Framework

Development Plan

In order to satisfy the first principle that was addressed above, we decided to start with the basic premise that every employee must have an Individual Development Plan (IDP). The IDP should be developed by the employee, his mentor, if he has one, and his supervisor. This arrangement might seem obvious, but it was not; since many employees did not have mentors and others have never seen an IDP. It is also worth noting that two years into the program and we still had employees that are not involved in their IDP and interesting enough some by choice.

Even with significant passive and active resistance from many supervisors and managers, we managed to get IDP for most employees, although the quality of these plans varied significantly.

Each IDP consisted of four sections. The first three sections were for the upcoming year; i.e. 1 year plan:

1. On-the-job competency based activities
2. Formal training (in-company and out-of-company training)
3. Goals and objectives sections; where we could include things such as achieve PMP^®
4. 5 Years look ahead; such as possible future developmental assignments

The Four Career Stages

Describing the details of the Four Career Stages concept is outside the scope of this paper. In summary, this is a model based on the premise that there are four career stages in a person career. These stages are the Apprentice, Colleague, Mentor, and Sponsor. Our program focused only on the first two, but addressed the possibility of the four stages (Dalton & Thompson, 1986)

Competency Based Program

There are many competency based programmers that are available in the market, including the Project Management Institute's (PMI^®) Project Management Competency Development Framework, which we would have liked to use; since it is an international system suggested by PMI. However, this was one of our limitations; our parent organization was developing a “technical” competency program for “project engineers”, with a focus on our industry. As a result, we had to follow the internal initiative. The challenge was in the fact that the Technical Competency Program was not yet ready. To overcome this challenge, we were able to work with the developers and obtain enough information about it to incorporate into our program; in order not to duplicate the effort. This turned out to be an excellent step because when the company rolled out the Technical Competency Program, our department was already familiar with it.

Once we had identified the necessary competencies that we wanted our engineers to acquire, we linked them to the four stages concepts. This link was basically identifying what competency and level of competence we wanted an engineer to acquire at the various levels of his career. These competencies, level of competence, and career stage were mapped via an excel spreadsheet.

Program Specific Components

On-the-Job Training

Once we developed the “competency spreadsheets”, we encouraged all supervisors, mentors, and employees to use it to complete section 1 of the Individual Development Plans; the on-the-job competency based activities and targets. In order to do this and for this step to make practical sense, “the trio” had to consider the type of work that the employee would be embarking on during the upcoming years; i.e. project phase such as preliminary engineering, detailed engineering, or construction phase of the project where the employee was assigned. This was the most difficult part of the IDP since supervisors kept listing the project that the employee is working on rather than listing the necessary development activities and goals that the employee should be working on during the year. We had to recycle many IDP more than once to get as close as possible to what we wanted. The challenge here was in the fact that the supervisors wanted to give the impression that they are complying with the requirements by “filling in the easy to get information” rather than take the time to analyze the development need of the employee.

Formal Training

This was section 2 of the individual Development Plan and it was easier to do than section 1, but still we had some challenges. In our company, we had many training organizations each with a different focus. To simplify the life of supervisors, mentors, and employees, the team established a spreadsheet based tool to summarize all of the available in-company offered formal training and identified many of the seminars offered by out-of-company providers. Although the team did its best to simplify the process, some supervisors did not make the proper effort to identify the true development needs of the employees.

Development Goals

In addition to the actual on-the-job development activities, we wanted our employees to pursue major goals that go beyond their normal day to day work and encourage them to share their knowledge (this is inline with PMI's Professional and Social Responsibility concepts for employees to enhance their competence and contribute to PM knowledge base).

To formalize this concept, we used the third section of the Individual Development Plan. In this section employees could list major goals; such as: pursue project management certifications, develop a tool for use by the employee unit or overall organization, share their knowledge by conducting presentation at our monthly events, discussed below.

Long Term Focus

As we stated earlier, under Limitations in the previous section, we wanted to develop a balance between the short term focus (1 year IDP) and long term “career path” focus. We had actually developed draft typical “career paths” for the various positions that existed in our organization. However, that was shut down so we developed a mid term focus and included on the IDP a section for five years look ahead. That did not work and was not used by most people for a variety of reasons; including, but not limited to:

• Supervisors did not have full control to decide the future assignment of their employees
• As a result, supervisor did not want to commit to anything in writing for fear that the employee will take this “potential assignment” section for granted and insist on it – creating an environment for conflict

Program Implementation

Ensuring Implementation

Once the above four sections of the Development Plan were completed, one major question remained: how to ensure implementation? To ensure implementation we devised an IDP Compliance Index. This index was simple; we allocated “points” for all development activities (similar to the PDU concept). These points were allocated to formal training and e-learning activities, developmental assignments, and development goals. The points were included on the IDP before it was finalized. For the first year, we agreed to set a target of 60% for completion of the IDP activities.

Transparency

During the year, the team was responsible to monitor completion of these activities and at the end of the first year (2003) we reported back to the whole organization on the status of our implementation and we could provide data on how did we do at the overall organization level, unit level, and employee level. We did status all IDP and sent back to employees their actual report “like a report card”; however, this report card was not “for the employee alone” it was for the whole organization since the employee did not have full control over their IDP activities (course or assignments cancellation were for example factors beyond the control of the employees.) We also conducted year end survey to gain the feedback of the employees on the process that we followed during the year. Finally, we conducted accountability presentations to review the results of the IDP Compliance Index and Feedback Survey, with any employee who decided to attend.

It is worth noting that one of the things that we did to show our employees management commitment toward the implementation of these programs and transparency, we added a measure for our compliance index on the organization balance score card that would be visible to senior management.

Other Related Programs and Activities

Monthly Events

In addition to the Individual Development Plans, we wanted to encourage knowledge sharing in the organization and advocate the concepts of a learning organization. Another goal that we had envisioned was to provide our young engineers with opportunities to gain additional exposure in the following themes: technical (engineering), project management, and business related matters that might not be readily available to them at that early stage of their careers. To meet both of these related objectives, we created a monthly knowledge sharing program, where we bring in these young engineers for a day and have their “more senior” colleagues present to them on a variety of topics; topics were in line with the overall themes. Each of those presentations lasted from 30 minutes to 2 hours and we had multiple presentations and speakers during any given event. It was worth noting that we used this forum to give some of the young engineers an opportunity to present on their own work, if the topic was of a general interest.

When we started this program in 2003 it was mostly limited to our department employees (not by design), then the word started to get out. During our second year we had many participants from outside our core organization and on our third year, we actually had more from other organizations than from our own. It is unfortunate that with the departure of the lead author from this organization this program was cancelled; although just recently we heard that they might re-activate it.

Certifications

When we embarked on these development programs, we also noticed that for a project management organization the number of Project Management Professionals (PMP^®) that we had was only fractional in comparison to the number that are practicing project management. Initially, we started just to talk and promote certifications. One of our teams (that was on assignment in Canada) took on the challenge and a few of its members become certified. To take over the advocacy of professional project management, via the PM^®P, to another level, the lead author of this paper developed a PMP^® preparation program that was internal to the organization and conducted the first session in 2003; as a result, we had gained a few more PMP^®. In 2004 we opened this certification program to the “parent” organization and we gained more PMP^®. The bottom line result: between May 2003 and September 2005, the number of PMP^® in the organization grew by more than 500% a large percent of them through the program in our department.

Results, Challenges, and Lessons Learnt

Results of the Various Initiatives

Employee Satisfaction

After the initial implementation of the Development Program, employee satisfaction jumped to more than 80%, but a year later had settled back down around 71%, which is still much higher than the survey that launched this effort.

Compliance Index

In 2003 our target for the IDP Compliance Index was 60%; we achieved 68%. We raised the target in 2004 to 70% and we achieved 76%. The 2005 target has been set to 75%, but since we left the organization we are not sure of the results.

Monthly Events

The willingness of senior employees to share their knowledge was a major challenge, more on this below. However, despite this challenge, we were able to conduct 9–10 sessions per year (missing a perfect 12 ‘1 per month’ was mostly due to low level of activities during the summer). The overall satisfaction of participants was more than 90%; based on written feedback surveys conducted at the end of each session in year 1 of the program.

Certifications

This is another success story. It is due to the program that our organization sponsored we were able to grow the number of PMP^® in the overall company by a factor of 5. Further, it is worth noting that the number of PMP^® that achieved certifications because of this program was a significant percentage for the whole region.

Encountered Challenges

Obviously, we faced many challenges, some of them we were able to deal with others we could not. Here are some of the challenges that we faced and how we dealt with them.

Individual Development Plans

One of the initial challenges that we faced was employee acceptance due to lack of trust. Our employees felt that this Individual Development Plan idea is another “flavor of the month”. To deal with this challenge, we embarked on promotional “sales” trips where we visited each of the units (those units were geographically spread out). We shared with the units the concept behind the initiative and what we were trying to do to implement these concepts. The idea of IDP Compliance Index and Balanced Score Card helped in minimizing the mistrust. At the end of the first year, we conducted the accountability report and presentation that we mentioned earlier, those also helped since we were able to demonstrate that we are monitoring and tracking the implementation and not “just producing papers”.

Another challenge that we faced was the resistance of the supervisors and line managers – mostly due to “lack of time”. We had to work with them closely to ease the “pain”. We created some simplified tools where the requirements could have been complicated or not readily available. Other time we used “position power” where the manager was willing to help. At the end, the results were still mixed and some supervisors never truly complied with the requirements and management did not step in to highlight the importance of this matter.

The challenge with 5 years look ahead was mentioned earlier and this was one of the things that we gave up on and accepted that supervisors will not do.

Monthly Events

As mentioned earlier, the challenge was to get the senior personnel in our organization to contribute to the sessions, but they were quite hesitant. “Training is not our responsibility”, “we do not have time” were some of the comments that we heard. To deal with this challenge it was not easy. We started to go outside the immediate organization to identify speakers and a few were more than willing. We also encouraged the young engineers to present at these monthly events, which was a good thing as well. Finally, where we were short a presenter or two, the author stepped in and covered the gaps.

Certifications

Here again we faced many challenges, mostly lack of support from management. This was in various forms: (a) not allowing enough time for the program developer to enhance the materials, (b) not promoting the program as widely as possible, and (c) some managers did not allow their employees to participate because of “time constraints”. Also since this was a major initiative and since the PMP^® is a major challenge, especially because English is a second language for most program participants, we tried to establish some kind of recognition program to the employees who achieve the PMP^®. However, the result was also mixed – some managers supported this others did not.

General Management Challenge

In our organizations we experienced a high turn over in the chief position; we were getting management rotation almost on a yearly basis. Most of these programs were implemented “three managers ago” and that manager was very supportive of these initiatives and allowed us to implement them, with some limitations as discussed earlier. Further, he was personally involved in some of them. Due to our immediate success in some areas, during the first year, the second manager that came along also supported the effort – but his personal involvement was not readily available. That weakened some of the programs, especially in areas where we needed management “push”. The third and current manager provides an appearance of support, but he was far removed from the initial thoughts and history that led to these programs and as a result the programs were significantly weakened.

Further, in an organization that is responsible for a large capital program “project management” takes over as the key priority instead of focusing on the people who manages these projects. Professional development is seen as a disruption rather than a key success criteria and something we only do if we have nothing else. We understand that these are strong statement, but they are the reality that we had to deal with and we are positive that this current reality exists in many other organizations.

Lessons Learnt

Many of the lessons learnt through this process are identified in the text above, but here are more:

1.      For certifications: many people under estimated the challenge for certifications, so it was easy for employees to enroll in a PMP^® preparation program, but not many went through with the exam. In response to this lesson, during our third year of the program, we insisted that program participants complete some pre-requisites, including applying for the exam with PMI before they were enrolled in the program.

2.      For monthly events: we started these programs as soon as we could, leading to many gaps in instructors, as mentioned earlier. The answer, line up the instructors/speakers for at least three months in advance and get their firm commitment; also have back up identified.

3.      For the IDP Compliance Index: the accountability report and presentation were good sources of helping us gain the confidence of employees – we should have done this every six months instead of at the end of the year.

4.      Get the managers commitment identified and in writing; then do not waste time chasing uncooperative or un-supportive managers.

5.      A few times we encourage some of young engineers to seek out speakers candidates from among their friends outside our core organizations. This worked well and we gained a few good speakers.

Closing

“We are not claiming the introduction of innovative or revolutionary concepts; all what we are doing is highlighting ideas, systems, approaches, programs that are being utilized in many parts of the industrialized world.” (Ajam 2004) Having said that, our experience shows that although some of these ideas seem simple, yet they were hard to implement.

The implementation of the above programs had been a challenge, hard work, and joy for the lead author of this humble paper. The challenges were frustrating at times almost leading to giving up. Yet, every time we were almost ready to throwing the towel, good news came. Good news came via a phone call from someone who just came out of a PMP exam with successful result. Good news came through a new PMP feeling triumphant that he had to come to our office for a hug. Good news, when a young engineer comes to you to thank you for the effort that is helping him learns new things in life.

This is the simple and shear power of knowledge.

This is what it takes to “build a knowledge society” (UNDP, 2003).