The Money Files

PMI has released a new 2022 jobs report, which provides some insights into how the profession is looking around the globe. It’s not terrible, which chimes with my own experience here in the UK. I often mentor project managers who are looking for jobs and after interview practice or a CV review, and the market feels pretty good.

But anecdotal feedback aside, what do the numbers say about the future of the jobs market? Here are my key takeaways from the situation in Europe according the PMI survey.

Issues with supply chain

I know of projects that are on hold at the moment due to supply chain issues. My projects are being affected by longer lead times. Even buying a sofa is affected by long lead times: we have been told our sofa will arrive in 16 weeks and we can’t order an armchair because there is no fabric in stock.

So project managers might feel like the job situation isn’t too bad at the moment, but projects are certainly not progressing at the pace they used to. According to the PMI study, the supply chain issues have contributed to an inflation spike of 5%, which is going to affect salaries and put people under more pressure as the cost of living rises.

Demand for IT professionals

The report says that IT is the area to focus on if you are job hunting. The talent gap in this sector is huge, and there is a lot of tech funding around. Plus our ways of working since the pandemic began have massively changed – along with our customers’ expectations of what they can do online. That’s changed the requirements for many long-term projects and no doubt boosted the need for more IT project managers.

Hybrid working

If you are a European project manager who wants to live the hybrid life, watch out for what your employer expects. My takeaway from the PMI survey is that employers want more of us back in the office – and we don’t want to go. Only 28% of employers believe that the model of work they are offering is aligned to their employees’ preferences.

Employees want more hybrid and remote; employers want more bums on seats in the office. I’m not sure how we reconcile that to be honest. However, it is worth spending some time thinking about how you can make hybrid work for your project team. Nearly 60% of people report that remote and hybrid work options result in increased job satisfaction, and that has to be good for project team morale.

However, only 34% believe that remote options lead to greater productivity. Perhaps there is a backlash against only seeing your colleagues as a tiny head on MS Teams. I think that hybrid certainly has a place, and I know of project managers who have turned down roles that were not hybrid or remote-friendly.

Overall though, the outlook for work in the project sector in Europe seems optimistic. There is still a lot of concern about job security and the cost of living – although I can only speak for what I see here – but globally money is being made available to reinvent and innovate where we can.

If you want to succeed amidst the current global economic situation and all the uncertainties that brings, it would be good to focus on adaptability, change, flexibility and resilience as there are all the signs that these skills are going to be in demand for many years to come.

When you’re putting together a new project proposal, there are a number of things to consider. Edoardo Binda Zane has a whole book about proposal writing: Writing Proposals: A Handbook of What Makes Your Project Right for Funding. He says that there are three main elements:

• The technical proposal, where you set out your solution or project objective
• The administrative proposal, where you prove you are eligible for any funding
• The budget.

Project proposals of this kind are quite different from in-company project business cases. These relate to projects where you are basically pitching another organisation to give you funding for your project. This happens in research, academia and sometimes other areas like business incubators for start ups.

Let’s say you want to put a funding proposal together for a business incubator. You know you are eligible and you’re gathering the paperwork to prove it. You can put your budget together in the format they want. But the technical proposal…. It’s hard to know exactly what goes in that, even if you know your own solution perfectly and have already costed it. This is about communicating the value and approach of your project so it gets chosen over someone else’s.

It helps if the funding-granting body has given you a template to complete. That certainly takes the guesswork out of it. If that doesn’t happen, you’ll be reliant on your own internal templates and they might not be geared up for this kind of application.

Binda Zane has some pointers for what to include. The headings below are what he suggests goes into your technical proposal along with an explanation of how I would interpret those if it was my project.

Introduction

Pop something in here to set the scene. Personally I would write the introduction last so I could make it contextually relevant to the rest of the document. If you don’t normally leave it to the end to write the intro, try it next time – it’s so much easier!

Current context and proposal structure

This should cover the context of the project and any background information that’s useful for the decision makers to have. It could also describe the research you’ve done (not in detail) or other sources from which you’ve drawn information to prepare this proposal.

It’s also a kind of executive summary that outlines what they can expect to read in the proposal and gives them the headlines in an easy to digest format.

Methodology

You’d cover off the project goals and objectives. This would be just like a standard business case.

Binda Zane suggests that you talk about the tools and techniques to be used. This can give the decision makers confidence that you do have some clue about how to manage a project. If you can say that you’re using industry standard best practices and following guidance from PMI (or whatever methodology/standard/processes are applicable to your business) then do.

I’d make sure that governance gets a significant mention here. If you were asking for my money I’d want to know that you had controls in place to spend it sensibly.

Of course, you shouldn’t say that you can follow standards if you actually can’t. That would be a breach of the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Other professional bodies have similar ethics standards.

You’d also want to include a section that outlines your detailed approach, the work packages and the descriptions of each task, at least to a sensible level that tells them what you are all about. If you think this section might go on a bit, move some of the task descriptions or detail to the end and put it in an appendix.

Organisation and Staffing

This section covers what they need to know about the people who will be involved with the project and how the work would be organised.

Binda Zane suggests management of quality control is covered in this section but I think there’s some flexibility to move it elsewhere if that makes better sense to you. I think I’d include this in my methodology section but there could be good reason for keeping it here.

Up until now you’ve only talked about what you will do, and how you will do it, but there hasn’t been any talk of how long that will take. Mention the timescales, major phasing and anything else relevant: key milestones, reporting dates and so on.

You also want to talk about the project team in this section. Describe the make up of the team, the organisation structure for the project and the roles and responsibilities of the key players.

Appendices

Binda Zane recommends two appendices. You can dump information in here that would take up too much space in the main proposal but is still useful for the audience to have. His suggestion is that you include the CVs/resumés of the project team and also a selection of project references. By that I would surmise that you could include references from past clients about similar projects, awards your team has won for their project work and anything else that makes you look like a solid and stable organisation.

That should give you a solid project proposal – for the technical element, at least. What else would you include in a technical proposal? I’m interested to hear your thoughts about what might be missed out of the list here!

Steve Jenner gave a presentation at the PMI Power Talks recently – a set of TED-style short presentations hosted in the centre of London by the PMI UK Chapter. He spoke about portfolio management and benefits.

Benefits, he explained, are not just one dimension of project portfolio management. They are the rationale for the investment of shareholders’ funds.

Often, he said, benefits are used as the way to justify the project. He pointed out that isn’t correct: benefits are the rationale for the project. We “go looking for benefits to justify what we want to do anyway,” he said.

Then people are surprised that they didn’t realise the predicted benefits. How could the project have done that? The benefits were made up anyway.

“Strategic alignment means nothing,” he went on to say. You can align anything with anything. Anything can be aligned up front. It’s what happens later that matters. Strategic contribution, he said, is where it’s at.

When you can’t justify a project by any other means, people call them “strategic projects”.

So how do you get round the problem of fictional benefits?

Don’t treat all projects the same way

Steve explained that it’s foolish to treat all projects the same way. Tailor the investment criteria: don’t try to rank and assess projects that relate to keeping the business functioning in the same way that you would innovation projects.

If you are investing to save money or increase revenue then it makes sense to do a cost benefit analysis.

If you’re doing it to make a strategic contribution, then benefits aren’t always clear in cost terms.

For projects that are mandatory, there is only one question that matters: Do we really have to do it? If it’s a $200m mandatory project with justifiable benefits of $300m and the project cost goes up, then we won’t worry if it now costs $250m. But if we are doing the project to be cost effective, and it isn’t really mandatory, then the cost increase matters. A lot.

Avoiding Fictional Benefits

Here are some tips that Steve gave for making sure your projects are adequately justified.

1. Be clear about the benefits you are buying

Financial benefits can be cash releasing: you can use the money elsewhere for other things, or non-cash releasing: they save money but you can’t actually access the money.

An example of that latter category would be things like process improvements that might shave a minute off a process. You aren’t going to make a staff saving on that. Saving staff time is only a benefit if you do something with it, so Steve argued that these aren’t real benefits at all.

2. Link gate reviews to funding

If your project gate reviews – the steps you go through at the end of each project stage to validate that it’s OK to move to the next point in the project – are not linked to funding or project performance then they don’t serve a purpose.

All they’ll do is just slow projects down and add bureaucracy. Unless they are meetings and project reviews with teeth i.e. that they can stop your project, what’s the point? Your portfolio, Steve said, should be a funnel not a tunnel. In other words, you need to be stopping projects, or delaying funding, and taking those hard decisions because that’s your job and how you protect the funding.

3. Expect improvement

This was an interesting point: expect things to get better and they will. Create a culture where project improvement is expected. Where project control is expected. Where generally you just expect things to be better week on week, year on year. And don’t let lack of improvement go unnoticed.

I’m looking forward to the next PMI Power Talks: I think the quality of speakers was exceptional and it was a really well-organised event. This session by Steve was very thought-provoking.

An enterprise resource pool is a great way to track and manage the people available to work on projects. It’s often set up by the Project Management Office and used to work out who is going to be a good fit for the skill needs of a new project.

Setting one up doesn’t have to be a big job or particularly complex, and many project management software tools will do this for you. Dan Lefsky, speaking at the PMI Global Congress EMEA in Barcelona, talked about the things you need to include in your resource pool data set in order to get the most use out of it.

Categories of Resource

He explained that a resource pool includes two types of resources:

• Generic resources (these could actually be non-people resources like meeting rooms, although he didn’t cover those)
• Named resources (these are your potential project team members).

The Data Needed For Your Resource Pool

He gave examples of the 8 things you need to consider and record for each named resource in order for you to be able to usefully draw on the data to select team members for upcoming projects. These are:

1. The Type of Resource

Is the person a Business Analyst, a Project Manager, a Quality Analyst, a User Experience expert, a Tech Writer, a Developer? Or something else? This is typically their job title and doesn’t necessarily reflect their particular skills.

2. Skillset

This is where you record their skills. You’ll probably want to set up a drop down list or categories that you can tick from as searching free text fields is going to be too difficult once you’ve got all your resources on there. Skills can include programming languages, Agile/waterfall/hybrid PM methodologies and so on.

3. Experience

It’s worth noting the experience of each individual. This could include the departments they have worked on, the category of project they do, the number of years they have been at the company, or years’ experience overall in their role, the key relationships they have within informal networks etc.

4. Cost

Cost of resource is a factor. Are they charged at time and materials? Or fixed price? What’s their internal day rate when working on projects? You might not have costs for some resources because it’s moving ‘wooden dollars’ around the organisation and that’s fine, but if you intend to charge clients for resource time then you’ll need to know what each person costs.

5. Location

Where is the resource based? For some projects it might not matter because they can work virtually, but for others it might have a significant impact. You could categorise these, Lefsky said, by onsite, offshore, onshore, nearshore or remote. Or you could list the city where they work (or do both).

6. Maximum Availability

This could change depending on their other commitments but it’s definitely a useful piece of information to have for some resources. For example, where an individual also works as a team manager, they will have certain management responsibilities that take up some time. These are things, speaking from experience, like approving timesheets, managing team’s expenses, team-level reporting, 1-to-1 meetings and performance reviews, dealing with sickness absence and so on.

You can’t allocate these people to your project 100% of the time. In fact, it’s not sensible to allocate anyone to your project 100% of the time. Note down what time they have outside their normal responsibilities that can be allocated to project work.

7. Manager

Knowing their line manager is helpful for resource requests.

8. Resource Breakdown Structure

Lefsky talked about positioning resources in the Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS) as this lets you see their security permissions, areas of control and similar. If you have a formal RBS then this could be worth doing but if you don’t, you could just as easily create another categorisation for security clearance if that was important to you.

Gather all this information and start to populate your enterprise resource pool. When you get started you’ll probably just focus on the people who spend a lot of time working on projects, but it’s worth expanding this if you can, and if you are going to take an enterprise-wide view of portfolio management. It’s a big job, and you have to reconcile the fact of treating individuals as ‘resources’ who can be put into little boxes and categorised, instead of the unique individuals that they are, but in large organisations particularly it can be incredibly successful.

Note that you’re going to have to continually review this. While someone’s job title might not change that often they could gain new experience through projects or develop new skills after training. Don’t let your resource pool data get out of date or you won’t benefit from being able to develop individuals or from letting them use new skills.

Do you use a resource pool? Let us know in the comments if it has been successful for you or whether – as I suspect it might be in many companies – it was set up as a one-off exercise and then not developed further, thus falling out of use very quickly. I look forward to hearing your experiences!

PMI have launched a new credential recently: the Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP)^SM. The pilot finished in February and at the moment you can’t sit the exam while they review the feedback from that, but you can still apply and it won’t be long before exam dates can be booked.

Credentials in general are a good way to advance your career. This one demonstrates your experience in managing organizational portfolios and could enhance your chances of getting a pay rise. Anything that means your bosses recognise that you are doing a good job and are professional in the way you go about it improves your standing at work (or if your company doesn’t value that sort of thing, help you find a company that will). PMI’s literature claims it helps make you more marketable so you may find employers starting to ask about this credential if you are going for PMO and strategic level jobs.

So, as this month is all about Portfolio Management on projectmanagement.com, I thought I’d explore the PfMP a bit more.

Is it for you?

It won’t be for the majority of people. It’s aimed at people who are responsible for portfolio management in their companies. PMI define a portfolio as:

“a collection of programs, projects and/or operations managed as a group. The components of a portfolio may not necessarily be interdependent or even related—but they are managed together as a group to achieve strategic objectives.”

You can see that this will only relate to a few people in your business, or one particular team. It’s a strategic, high level job rather than a hands-on project management job, although you don’t have to have the job title of Portfolio Manager to be eligible to apply.

What are the pre-requisites?

As with the other PMI credentials, you’ll need to meet certain criteria before you can apply. You’ll need a high school diploma or equivalent with at least 7 years of portfolio management experience in the last 15 years. Or 4 years’ experience if you have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent.

Then you’ll need to demonstrate 8 years of professional business experience. As PMI say that one of the roles of the Portfolio Manager is to establish and guide the selection, prioritization, balancing, and termination processes for portfolio components to ensure alignment with organizational strategy you’ll have to show that you’ve been working at a senior level in your firm.

What’s involved in the application process?

Your application will be reviewed by a panel of expert volunteers who are also portfolio managers. This bit takes around 4 weeks. Then there’s the exam. You’ll have to take the exam within a year of passing the panel review. It’s a multiple choice computer-based exam, so if you have taken any other PMI credentials you will be familiar with the format.

Will it help my career?

Who can say? Only you can answer that question.

On one hand, it’s a new credential so until there is a critical mass of portfolio managers holding it employers may struggle to recognise its worth.

On the other hand, getting it in the early days will set you apart from the rest of the field when you apply for new jobs.

As with any credential, having it shows that you have demonstrable skills and experience and the commitment to the profession to study for and sit an exam. I think it’s too early to tell if candidates with the PfMP credential will earn more than others in the same role but from past experience and the salary surveys from PMI it’s probably likely that they will in time.

Credentials and certificates are an investment, and it is always worth talking to your manager about whether he or she will fund your application and exam fees, or even give you time off work as study leave. They may say that they won’t fund it but you might be pleasantly surprised! I’m looking forward to watching this credential as it evolves and more people take it: as PMI are positioning themselves and project management as a strategic thing this fits well with their current focus (or at least that is how it looks from the outside).