Training Pays for Itself; Failure to Train Is Expensive

In my last post on our Strategy & Projects blog, I reported the troubling news from PMI’s 2016 Pulse of the Profession that project and program success rates have faltered, and pointed readers to PM Solutions’ materials on project recovery, including a recent webinar, now available on demand.

What I didn’t write about, which is also a key finding of PMI’s study, is that these poor rates of performance – from failure to deliver project benefits to budget and schedule overruns – are paired with another disturbing trend: investment in project management training is flat since 2012.

There is a bright side: for those organizations that invest in ongoing project management training, establish competency development programs and also provide the organizational support for project managers to grow in their profession (career paths and formal knowledge transfer processes), the picture is much less grim. Their projects succeed at meeting goals, staying within budget and on time, and preventing scope creep far more reliably. Companies without a training focus report 21% of their projects are deemed failures; for those with such a focus, it’s 13%.

This finding echoes that of the PM Solutions State of the PMO 2014 study, which showed that high-performing organizations invest three times as much in training as low performers. But there’s more: all training is not created equal. PMI’s “Talent Triangle” concept recommends that organizations develop project management skills by focusing equally on technical, business and leadership skills. Yet in the 2016 Pulse study, they found that only 25% of companies consider these types of skills an equal priority.

For companies that do place high priority on developing staff in all three areas, project outcomes also improve dramatically:  for example, their projects meet business goals 71% of the time, compared to only 51% for companies that don’t follow the Talent Triangle rule.

Our 2015 Project Manager Skills Benchmark found that, despite a continuing heavy focus on technical skills within the project management community, executives placed a higher emphasis leadership skills for project managers. They know that poor project performance is no trivial matter. According to PMI, approximately US$122 million of every US$1 billion invested in projects is wasted, and this amount has increased by 12% in just the last year.

Which leads me to this epiphany: now is a great time for training managers to track project performance metrics, and link the improvement in outcomes, and the financial benefits associated with them, back to the training investment. Training pays for itself; and you can prove it. No time like the present.