A Closer Look at Enablers of Greater Project Performance

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Career Development   Leadership  

In the 2024 PMI Pulse of the Profession® report, the third of its three topics discusses enablers of greater project performance. Figure 15 on page 24 highlights the enablers, the percentage of organizations that support the enablers, and the project performance rate when those enablers are present.

Now, I honestly have no issue with the enablers, nor do I hold any skepticism toward enabler/performance correlations, The bottom line is that enablers are simply there to help PMs be more successful, which is a good thing.

My focus isn’t on the what and how, it’s on the why, when and who.

Each of the enablers (with one exception that I will get to) are about what and how: what technique to use and how it will be delivered to help the PM grow. Whether the enablers are a community of practice, employee resource group, or training on new ways of working, they address a real or perceived need in the workplace.

I’ve learned that there is correlation between learning and the proximity of need the learning satisfies. Let me explain.

Let’s say you've signed up for training on how to write exec-speak status reports. This is a fine thing for any PM to learn to do well—but if you don’t use what you’ve learned soon afterward, the learning and its effectiveness will decay.

This is where the why and when come into play. For…

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