How many Project Managers are in the US and Canada?
Categories:
Research
Categories: Research
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Situation: You love obscure facts about Project Management.
Oddly enough, we get asked this a lot. However there aren't a lot of good numbers to go by. PMI estimates that there 16.5 million Project Managers in the world. Both PMI and Gantthead have relationships with a bit more than 600K each, with roughly a 13% overlap. 66.8% of PMI members are based in North America. 53.9% of gantthead members are based in North America. So that implies that there may be 8.7M-11M Project Managers in North America. Of course, these percentages shrink every year as the industry (and everything else in the world) becomes more global - but that's our "guesstimate". |
Why is it SO Hard to Hire the Right People?
| Situation: You feel like there's something wrong with the way you hire. Two weeks ago, at the PMI research conference,
Dr. Joana Geraldi, Senior Research Fellow at Cranfield School of Management, International Centre for Programme Management gave a presentation entitled Finding the Right Person for the Job: Rethinking Work-Worker Fit in PPM. The presentation was based on a research paper she co-authored with Harvey Maylor, Sergio Pellegrinelli and Scot Colquhoun. We recently asked her a few questions about how we can put her findings into action. The answers to the questions below are her personal opinions, but closely tied to the research findings. Her perspectives, both here and in the research paper are pretty thought-provoking.
Q. During your presentation you discussed the problems with the way that "fit" is judged. (a worker's fit with a work profile, or work fit to a worker's profile) Could you briefly discuss how that fit is currently determined and the problems with that approach?
Q. Hiring managers and PM practitioners seem to be unaware of these issues. Why do you think that is?
A. It is difficult to say, but my guess is that the current approaches are more accessible, widely known among HR practitioners. There are plenty of people trained to assess people through these well known competence-based models. This makes life easier. We may also be tempted by the rationality and objectivity that these models promise.
Q. You talked a bit about a more holistic approach to hiring that doesn't create such a strong separation between the work and the worker. Could you describe this approach? Do you have any tips for someone who would like to put this into practice?
A. First the theory: Building on Sandberg (2001) and Partington et al (2005) we look at worker and work as inseparable. An individual's competence cannot be reduced to objective lists of activities, but is constituted by the subjective meaning that work takes on for workers in their lived experience of it. Our task is to understand what individual workers conceive of as work and, through the elicitation of examples, how they conceive of it. More specifically, Partington proposes four conceptual levels:
That is interesting, but how do you put it into practice? As a first step, Sergio Pellegrinelli and colleagues typically run assessments with project and programme managers and identify which of the four conceptual levels above they fit into. This helps the assessors identify high potential people in their firm and also make sure they are nurtured appropriately. The next question though is how to identify which projects or programs require candidates to be at the various conceptual. One way to map a project or program to a level is to judge it's complexity. One model to measure this complexity is MODeST (Maylor et al, 2008). This model looks at Mission, Organization, Stakeholders, and Team attributes to help judge complexity. There is still a need to explore the relationship between complexity and conceptual levels, these could be explored by studies, such as:
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Project Management - Getting Better or Worse?
| Situation: You occasionally wonder whether we're moving forward as a profession.
PMI's mission, roughly speaking, is to have business leaders view project management as essential for businessresults. Obviously, the best way to do that is to show increasing success over time. That's why I found this particular PMI research report interesting. Are we getting any better? Comparing project management in the years 2000 and 2008 was a report produced by Erling S. Andersen and present two weeks ago at the PMI Research conference. Mr. Andersen was kind enough to answer a few questions for us recently about the research he conducted.
Q. Your research was conducted using the X Model, could you tell us a bit about how that works? (both at the micro and macro level)
Q. You concluded that some areas of project management have shown improvement, saying specifically that team members are more knowledgeable about project work, project objectives are more clearly expressed, project organization is more appropriate, most work processes are improved, team members experience project work as rewarding and are more motivated for future projects, and the results of the project are more balanced. Why do you think this is true? Do you credit PMI? Better Training? Stiffer performance requirements from employers?
Q. You also talk about areas for improvement, specifically, in achieving the project mission and goals or keeping to the project schedule and budget. Why do you think this is the case? Q. Do you know of other recent and important research in this area? Do you know of other studies being conducted now that might be of interest?
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What's Interesting to You?
| Situation: You Like to Get Your Head Around the "Big Questions" in Project Management. Hey PM Thought Leaders >> Take a look at the list below and let me know if one of the topics could really help you tackle the challenges you face every day.
Earlier this week I attended PMI's Research & Education Conference 2010. The event has asubtitle - "Defining the Future of Project Management". While I'm not sure that anyone can "Define the future" of anything, I think there were some interesting presentations. I plan to interview some of the researchers, but I was hoping to get some feedback (either here as a comment or via email, whichever is easier) on what you might find interesting. During each interview I'll be attempting to identify who the research findings might be interesting to and what practical actions you can take based on their findings.
PMI presented awards for work in the following areas:
The 2010 Project Management Journal® Paper of the Year Award
Topics presented at the conference
Anything jump out as just what you were looking for? Let me know and I'll drill down deeper for you.
pplications of positive psychology to teaching project management and leadership.” J Davis Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, USA 2. “ Supporting interaction in the classroom – Using personal response units.” A W Gale School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, The University of Manchester, UK
3. “The use of Skype and other communications technologies to deliver international project management education.
pplications of positive psychology to teaching project management and leadership.” J Davis Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, USA 2. “ Supporting interaction in the classroom – Using personal response units.” A W Gale School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, The University of Manchester, UK
3. “The use of Skype and other communications technologies to deliver international project management education.
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How Does PPM Help You Optimize Resources?
| Situation: You want your PPM efforts to improve resource utilization. CA, the folks that bring you CA Clarity PPM, recently sponsored an IDC Survey - Organizations Optimize  Resources with PPM. We were lucky enough to ask IDC researcher, Randy Perry, a few questions about the survey and what it really means to you. By asking these questions, I tried to draw out some areas that you might want to focus on when conducting these types of efforts. Q: At the beginning of the report you offer a summary of benefits that participating companies experienced. • Number of projects managed increased 35%. • Cost per project was reduced 37%. • Redundant projects dropped 78%. • IT staff productivity increased by 14%. • Project failure rate dropped 59%. • The total annual benefit per 100 users is $83,500. • Payback occurred in 7.4 months. Which of these mattered most to these companies? (perhaps a top 3?) and why? Did the most important results line up with the way they sold the efforts in the first place? Randy Perry, IDC: The first two key benefits experienced by companies were reduction in number of redundant projects and reduction in the project failure rate. Roughly 40 percent of total savings came from reducing failed or redundant projects. Prior to the implementation of PPM software, companies, on average, had nearly 40 percent of their projects fail or deemed redundant. The primary cause of failed and redundant projects occurs in the planning stage due to issues with governance, IT demand, prioritization and selection. Most of the projects that failed should never have been initiated in the first place because they were not aligned with business goals or IT did not have a clear set of goals at the outset. Redundant projects would never have been initiated had all stakeholders had visibility into project prioritization. The third benefit most appreciated by companies in the study was the reduction in per-project costs. Per-project costs were reduced by 37 percent, which was primarily a result of better project and resource management. Better management allowed for a reduction in the time it takes to complete projects and also led to optimization of project staffing. Twelve of thirteen companies reported a reduction in project time by 13-63 percent (an average of 35 percent). Most companies used this time savings to complete projects that had been put off due to lack of resources. Q: You talk about organization measuring itself in the following areas: • IT governance • IT demand assessment • IT demand prioritization and selection • Business relationship management • Project management • Resource management If you were to come up with a forced ranking, how would you rank these in terms of their importance to an organization’s productivity? In terms of organizational effectiveness? (and Why?) Randy Perry, IDC: These areas are not entirely distinct and benefits of one tend to spill over into the others. For instance, IT governance is critical to an organization; it drives most of the other benefits. Prior to deploying PPM, 54 percent of the companies in the study had no IT governance program. In other words, their IT departments operated independent of the businesses they were supporting (budget setting notwithstanding). The business had no way of translating its goals to the IT department, no way of measuring the success of projects or IT, and, therefore, no real control of IT resources. Implementing IT governance establishes the link between business goals and IT budgets: it measures IT projects by their contribution to businesses’ strategic initiatives and ties changes in the business to changes in IT priorities. IT governance ensures that every project undertaken by IT has been approved by a board of stakeholders. Project goals are set and project successes can be measured. No one can later say: “Why are you doing that?” Resource management is the second largest benefit driver, accounting for 16 percent of total savings. Like IT governance, this is a planning area. PPM provides a way of looking at all the project-related requirements and then prioritizing people and other resources. Project management, perhaps the third most important driver, contains the knowledge loop that enables process improvement and optimization. Each project becomes a knowledge resource, enabling each successive project to be more efficient. Over time, projects are completed quicker with exactly the resources needed – no waste. Q: Clearly tools, coupled with process, have an impact in the following areas: • IT governance. • IT demand assessment. • IT demand prioritization and selection • Business relationship management • Project management. • Resource management. Are there particular tool functions that are important in each of these areas? Are there tools (specific tools or classes of them) that you know of that are particularly effective in any of these areas? Randy Perry, IDC: We really do not have research specific to a single function or tool. We covered a wide variety of tools – looking at seven different vendors. We found that one third of the participants used tools from multiple vendors. Q: At the end of your report, you categorize the study participants by industry, noting their maturity before and after PPM efforts. Which industries benefited most (and least) from PPM efforts? Why do you think that is? Randy Perry, IDC: The top three companies that saw the greatest benefits were financial institutions; the top two of those three were also among the most mature, so it’s all related. Financial organizations tend to have a greater reliance on their IT infrastructures than organizations in other industries do and, as such, their IT operations are more mature. Technology merely enables processes and policies. Companies at maturity level three (those with standardized processes, procedures and PPM tools) experienced 50 percent higher benefits than organizations at maturity level two (those with automated, but not standardized, processes and procedures) and 58 percent higher benefits than companies falling between ad hoc and automated, but not standardized processes and procedures. On a related note, IDC’s PPM Maturity Value Calculator, which was developed from the same IDC research. The calculator provides a personalized PPM maturity and benefits assessment. After using it, individuals can request a detailed action plan by email. The calculator is meant to give an overview of the benefits and next steps needed to build a PPM business case. |
