Project Management World Today Viewpoints
January 2006
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- Is PMI Really Getting Valid Input? by Hugh Woodward
- Are We There Yet? by Bryan McConachy
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ARE WE THERE YET?
by Bryan McConachy, PMP, PMI Fellow
The “we” is the 178,000 PMP’s; the “there” is sufficient soft skill training. Our paper titled “Just-In-Time Training - Using a Model of Project Results versus Team Enablers to Identify Post-PMP® Training ” (McConachy and Caine) was presented at the ProMAC 2004 conference in Tokyo and was published in the January - February 2005 edition of PM Forum. One theme of this paper was the contradiction that PMP® training for certification consists of seven knowledge areas which are hard skills and only two which are soft skills. That is, 80 per cent of the training to become a project management professional is in the hard skills and only 20 per cent of the training is in the soft skills. Yet the research shows that soft skills represent two-thirds of the essential abilities for effective management. Leading soft skills analyst Daniel Goleman, author of Working with Emotional Intelligence, emphasizes the importance of soft skills to managers. He reports that “the difference between those at the high end and low ends of the emotional intelligence scale is very large, and being at the top confers a major competitive advantage.” Since management is largely soft-skills intensive, and project managers are in the business of managing, why doesn’t the training for project managers recognize this discrepancy?
We advocated that project management skills should be learned in a “Just-in-Time” manner. When starting to manage projects, the hard skills should be learned first – you can't manage a project without fully understanding the constraints of scope, quality, schedule, and cost. Subsequently the remaining hard skills and the basic soft skills required for certification must be assimilated. These skills are necessary but not sufficient for a project manager to be successful today.
A survey of our clients as to their training requirements revealed that, of the programs we offer, their first four choices came back in the following order: Expedited Communications for Distributed Teams, closely followed by Project Success Criteria and Team Building, The Partnering Process and Project Governance. We consider all to be soft skill topics.
As part of our ProMAC presentation, we reviewed the brochure for Seminars World 2003 and 0reported in our paper that about 20 per cent of the topics were related to soft skills. The program for the ProMAC 2004 Conference also had approximately 20 per cent soft skill topics. When we reviewed the Seminars World 2005 conferences, we found that the percentage of soft skill sessions has risen to 40 per cent of the program. Even more dramatic was the 2005 PMI World Congress in Toronto where about 50 per cent of the sessions were soft skill topics. This is a huge change in just two years. So, are we there?
Although the type of seminars being offered appears to be moving in the right direction, who is taking the training? Is it the PMPs that are recognizing the need for additional training or is it project managers en route to certification? We have asked PMI what the attendance was at the soft skill seminars at the Toronto World Congress and we will pass along any response we get. We don’t expect there is any way of determining whether attendees were PMP’s or not.
We have the following 2 questions for readers:
- What kind of training are you taking?
- Do you agree with the importance of soft skills?
Send your responses to bryan@bramcon.ca and we will report back in a
later column.
About the Author:
Bryan McConachy, P.Eng., PMP is the principal of Bramcon Project Consultants who provide consulting, coaching and training in project organization, value and risk analysis and project control systems.
He began his career in engineering where he quickly moved from design and project engineer to project manager responsible for all aspects of industrial and transportation projects. He found that as project manager, he was having to use his then-limited interpersonal skills to get people with diverse backgrounds working together. After 15 years as a member of a chapter cooperative group providing training for the PMP Certification Exam, he is now an advocate of post-PMP training in the soft skills that he has found correlate with project success.
Mr. McConachy has been active in the Project Management Institute at both the local and international levels for 25 years. He has been a chapter president, was certified as a PMP in 1989 and in 1996, was elected a Fellow of PMI.
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