Which Project Training Approach is Best for Your Organization?

Mike has more than 12 years of project management experience spanning a variety of industries. He has acted as a consultant for federal, state and local government agencies; set up a PMO and managed strategic projects for a major automotive company in Australia; and currently is a Senior Project Manager in the Northern Colorado financial industry. Mike is PMP certified, a veteran of the USAF and has an MBA in finance and accounting.

  Career Development   Talent Management  

Project managers get plenty of training and expertise within the certification and continuing education processes (you are using certified project managers, aren’t you?), so I’d like to focus more on training for the sponsors and team members.

In many organizations, participation in project teams is seen as an “extra duty” outside one’s regular job. This means team members and sponsors generally do not have the level of project management knowledge or focus we project managers would like. This can cause all manner of frustration for the project manager.

So how do we make our lives easier? I’d like to look at three approaches to raising organizational knowledge though training. They are outsourced training, on-the-job training (OJT) and in-house training. I’ll try to use a little humor along the way just to make it more interesting--let’s see how many clichés and bad metaphors you can spot (I ask your forgiveness in advance!).

In order to evaluate these training approaches, it is useful to realize it may not be one-size fits all, but I hope to give you some food for thought. Contributors to a project fall into one of several categories: project managers, sponsors, team members and those affected by projects but not directly involved.

For today’s purposes, I am going to assume the project manager is …

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