6 Crucial Competencies for Today’s PMs, BAs

  Career Development   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

Organizations need project leaders and business analysts who possess behavioral-oriented competency skills, particulary in the areas of critical thinking, persuasion, social collaboration and conflict management.

The close of one year tends to make one reflect on what has occurred in the past year and ponder the future. Here we ponder some trends in the Project Management and Business Analysis fields for 2013. This year we want to concentrate on trends for 2013 relating to an emphasis on competencies.

As people become skilled and certified, their base knowledge and abilities are in place. PM, BA, CSM, and BPM practitioners also need to apply their tangible skills to solving problems and helping our organizations achieve their objectives. For example, let’s say Jane knows how to model business processes and how to improve them. But, she may not always get time from stakeholders to understand their process, or establish trust with them to learn the root causes of process problems. She may also run into sharp disagreements about how a new process should be designed or conflicting priorities for what to improve first.

All of these common situations require various “competency” skills, which are often referred to as “soft skills.” We prefer the term “competencies” instead. The trend we’re seeing is that developing so-called…

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