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Making Up A Budget for Next Year? Don't Skimp on Training: Here's Why

Posted by Deborah Bigelow Crawford

Deborah Bigelow Crawford has more than 20 years of experience in business management and handles the operational and administrative functions of PM Solutions. Ms. Bigelow Crawford also serves as Co-CEO of the PM College®, PM Solutions' training division, where she is responsible for the fiscal management and quality assurance of all training and professional development programs. Prior to joining PM Solutions, she served as the Executive Director of the Project Management Institute (PMI), and was instrumental in providing the foundation and infrastructure for the exponential growth that the Institute has maintained over the last 10 years. In addition, she served as the Executive Director of the PMI Educational Foundation. Over the last decade, she has authored numerous articles in PM Network, Chief Project Officer, and Optimize magazines. Ms. Bigelow Crawford is also co-author of the book Project Management Essentials. She has presented a variety of papers as a speaker at international symposia and conferences, and is a member of the National Association of Female Executives and the Project Management Institute.

This is the time of year where we begin to plan our budgets.  We begin to think “What worked last year, and what didn’t?”  Where might we shift some resources to keep driving our organization forward? What can we absolutely not stop funding?  What should we absolutely stop funding?

These can be tough questions.  The way you answer them could make the difference in success or disaster.  OK, I may be a little dramatic here, but the answers are important in your organization’s continued growth and success.

One area where companies typically shift the amount of resources a lot is employee training.  We are familiar with the rush to cut training budgets whenever times are tough. And to complicate this even further is deciding what kind of training is the most effective?  According the State of PM Training research in 2012, on average organizations provide six days of project management training per year.  Are organizations seeing organization benefits as a result of those six days?  According to this research, they are! Nearly 300 firms represented saw an average of 26% improvement in eight measures of performance due to their project training initiatives!  That’s impressive!   The actual areas of improvement were:

  • Improved Stakeholder Satisfaction – 29%
  • Improved Schedule lPerformance – 27%
  • Decrease in Project Failures – 26%
  • Improved Budget Performance – 25%
  • Improved Requirements Performance – 25%
  • Improved Quality Performance – 25%
  • Improved Productivity Performance – 25%
  • Improved Time to Market – 24%

The costs for these sixdays of training averaged $2,211.  Seems to me that the return on this investment would definitely be on the high side!  But that brings in a whole other topic that we.ve advocated in the past … performance measurement.   If we could measure effectively to see the positive results of our cost initiatives, we absolutely would see more success…and a greater “bang for our buck”!

However, I would still caution, there are no silver bullets.  Effort must be put into choosing the right courses, the right vendor, and making sure you have selected the right participants.  I believe a key consideration is also having your employees APPLY their training as soon as they return to the office.  If you implement a training program with this rigourousness, then your results might even be better than those above!

Well, I think I just helped categorize one item that falls into the “absolutely can’t stop funding” category!  Now, to move on to the others …. marketing is next!!

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