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Project Management Training
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Why Project Management Training MattersBy Maya Townsend, MDODProjects are over 100% more successful today than they were in 1994 (Standish Group, 2004). How can we explain this tremendous improvement? We're learning and companies are sending employees to project management training. Over the past twelve years, organizations have substantially improved project performance with project management training and methodologies. They have learned that projects work better when they are smaller and include rigorous communications, disciplined project management, and standard project management tools. As a result, cost overruns on challenged projects dropped from 180% to 43% (Standish Group, 2004). This is just one example of how learning boosts project management performance. Why Learning Matters Innovative companies experience profit growth four times greater than non-innovative companies (Business Horizons, 1996). 3M, for example, has a 15% rule that allows every employee to devote 15% of their time to their own projects. Out of this 15% came the idea of the Post-It Note, a product now essential to offices worldwide (Corporate Leadership Council, 1999). Learning helps organizations anticipate and react to change. Royal Dutch / Shell made a practice of running simulations in the late 1980s. As a result, the organization had the experience and readiness to make it through the 1991 Persian Gulf War without missing a beat. Today, highly competitive markets and small profit margins make cost reduction and process improvement critically important. Learning and training help organizations find those reductions and improvements. One public utility embarked on a team learning process. After several months of generating, analyzing, and implementing process improvement ideas, they achieved $1.3M in cost savings. When Learning Matters Strategic implementation. Executives see learning as integral to strategy implementation. Each year, organizations identify the few strategies that are critical to taking the business to the next level. These strategies almost always require change: change in workflow, priority, approach, or procedure. And change always requires learning, as people let go of old ways of doing business and adopt new techniques. Strategies shift from concept to realization as people identify what needs to be done in order to implement change. Transformation. Executive know that organizational transformation cannot occur without learning. As organizations implement new initiatives and process improvements, ranging from technology systems to outsourcing partnerships, employees must learn in order for the company to realize value from its investments. ”The learning function is critical during periods of intense change. It helps us invent, create, discover and respond. Change is a way of life in our industry, the learning organization is necessary to the existence of the company,” said one CXO (ASTD / IBM Study, 2006). Leadership development. Despite popular opinion, the majority of leaders are not born. They emerge from their surroundings, learning from experience, to lead organizations, teams, and initiatives to success. Visionary companies know this and tend to promote from within. 88.9% of the companies represented in the benchmark study on long-term organizational success, Built to Last, promoted from within to the CEO level. These CEOs gained their positions as a result of great investment from their companies in their learning, development, and growth. Capability building. Organizations need people who can learn. In the IT field, for example, developers must adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of programming languages. Public corporations must learn how to apply new government regulations. Market pressures make organizational capability building a necessity. It's also important individually. One Chief Learning Officer explained, “At the fundamental level, the mission of learning and knowledge is to develop people to ensure their future success” (ASTD / IBM Study, 2006). Making Learning Happen • Scanning for internal and external changes. Strong learning organizations consistently scan the environment for competitor development, potential new opportunities, changing customer needs, and industry trends. These findings point the direction towards future learning needs. • Appetite for improvement. The continual drive for better, more effective, and more efficient results fuels learning and increases an organization's ability to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and improve results. • Support for experimentation and occasional failure. Failures do occur as part of the natural learning process. The Disney Corporation openly encourages failure, citing the importance of failure to creativity. Michael Eisner, former Disney CEO, said that he doesn't mind if 90% of ideas fail provide that the other 10% generate income for the firm (Director, 1997). Organizations that make failure impossible encourage groupthink and uniformity, not creativity and invention. • Tolerance for dissent. In the most innovative and successful companies, employees are encouraged to speak up about redundant processes, repetitive tasks, and alternative techniques. These differences of opinion, and the creative tension that emerges from respectful dialogue about differences, produce learning, innovation, and often surprising results. • Support for learning. One kind of support is financial: paying for employee learning activities. Another type of support that is critical is the managerial and leadership commitment to learning: making the time in employees' schedules for learning. Benchmark companies allocate between 32 and 36 hours per year per employee for learning (ASTD / IBM Study, 2006). • Knowledge sharing. It's no fun to solve a tricky problem only to discover that another division already solved it last month. Best practices companies go beyond innovating and improving practices. They also share them so all can benefit from learning. ### About the author: Maya Townsend, founder and principal consultant of Partnering Resources builds aligned, focused, learning organizations that execute their goals more effectively. For more information, please visit: www.partneringresources.com. Increase Your Profitability Across Your Organization Learn more about Boston University experts instructors!
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