In Business, Knowledge Is Power

New PM College research study on high-value skills to be released May 18.

When the PM College invests in a research study, no matter what specific questions we ask, our ultimate goal is the same: to help our clients and prospective clients to understand how best to develop, improve and leverage the talents of project managers and other project management staff.  It’s all about the business! 

Our most recent study, carried out by PM Solutions Research, is the Project Manager Skills Benchmark, a survey of over 300 companies across a wide variety of industries to determine how skilled project managers are and what skills are deemed most important.  The design of our research study, as explained here, also allows us to validate the study participants’ ratings of important skills by showing which skills are possessed and/or valued by high performing companies. 

Companies continue to demand more of their project managers, and are placing an increased focus on delivering value. Organizations can help project managers deliver value by implementing training programs that address basic project management competency as well as advanced training programs, especially in leadership and business alignment.

Just to highlight a few findings:

• Project managers in all organizations need to improve leadership, business, and project management skills. Their skills are good to excellent in just 15% of organizations … and inadequate to fair in 30%.
• Project managers might be demonstrating respectable skills, on average, but they aren’t meeting expectations (the level of skill that the organization would like to see).
• Leadership skills are rated as more important than all other skills, even core project management skills.
• Leaders are far more likely than project managers to see benefits realization, project alignment with strategy, and poor communication as challenges.
• The top five challenges for project managers, which are basically all organizational issues, are resource management issues, unrealistic deadlines, dealing with scope changes, lack of clarity in scope, and unclear roles/responsibilities.

The message is pretty clear: instead of a hit or miss approach to project and program management improvement, based on training in basic skills alone, leaders should be asking themselves: How do we continue to improve the competency of our project managers so they can deliver increasing value to the organization? Training in a wide variety of skills across the spectrum is a significant part of the answer – but organizations must also create the environment in which projects can succeed by addressing barriers to performance that are inherent in organizational structure and processes.

To learn more about the study and how to implement its findings, please join us for a free webinar, "Knowledge Is Power: New Research Pinpoints Skills that Drive High-Performing Organizations" on June 18th. Register here