On Thursday, at the PMI conference in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the conference organizers featured a track of simultaneously translated presentations in English (adding additional complexity to their conference planning … and pulling it off beautifully, too). The keynote was Greg Balestero, CEO of the Project Management Institute. He spoke on the theme of project management in times of economic stress, and one statistic - to which he kept returning several times during the presentation - seemed particularly significant.

According to research by PMI, there are somewhere between 16 million and 20 million people around the world working on projects. (My personal bias is that it’s probably many more than that, but they don’t realize they are doing projects!) In contrast, there are only about 400,000 people holding project management certifications of various brands.

Whoa. That’s a lot of room for seat-of-the-pants, PM-by-accident, lucky (or unlucky) breaks on projects. Conversely, that’s a lot of room for improvement.

Of course, there’s an argument to be made that holding a certification doesn’t automatically make you a better project manager. But knowledge of the basics is so powerful that providing training - whether or not the recipients go on to achieve certification - is a must for companies that hope to sail through this particular economic stress. That’s doubtless why the companies doing the most training also report better organizational performance on a diverse scoreboard of measures, according to our 2009 PM Value study.

Whether you call it The Vanishing Mass Market (as Business Week has done), or The Long Tail, (as Wired blogger Chris Anderson terms it) or Nouveau Niche, it’s obvious that the way we interact with the marketplace has changed. Consumers want what they want, not some lowest-common-denominator, one-size-fits-all product. That’s why we have 100 specialized channels of cable TV instead of three networks.

On the organizational level, we’ve seen that companies are less interested in generic PM training, and more drawn to training solutions that are tailored to one industry, one company, one culture: theirs.

Now, it’s long been a matter of pride with project management experts that PM itself is a generalist. Project managers are fond of boasting, “have PMP will travel.” that their skills apply just as easily to an IT project as to construction or a lunar landing. That may be true–certainly the basic techniques of PM are industry-agnostic–but if I were a CEO I’d want to be sure the lessons I was paying for were lessons immediately applicable to my business. Wouldn’t you?

That’s why — and here’s another prediction — project management training will become less oriented to PMP self-study courses, and more “nouveau niche”: customized to industry and even to individual organization. Hats off to the curriculum developers (this one’s for you, Helene!): they will make all the difference. They make training solutions more nimble, more responsive … even, you might say, agile.

Continuing to crunch through the raw data from our Value of Project Management statistics, a coincidence struck me: across the board, the top-performing companies are training more intensively, and doing more training in non-technical subjects, than are the companies whose performance data falls in the lowest quartile in the study.

This jives with Frank Toney’s observation, in one of the first books we published, that as a project manager moves up the ladder organizationally, he or she relies less on technical skills and more and more heavily on facilitative and business skills. (The very skills our PM College’s new mastery-level “people skills” courses are designed to instill.)

It also reflects the reality, uncovered in our State of the PMO research, that PMOs are moving up the organization to the enterprise level, by the hundreds, and taking on new and expanded roles as they gain esteem and responsibility. One of those roles involves the professional development of project managers and other project resources. The top performers in the Value study do the majority of their training on site, providing project management development that dovetails with their industry, organizational culture, and business objectives … and which focuses on advanced topics rather than on the nuts and bolts.

Here’s a prediction: in our next round of research, we’ll see even more enterprise-level PMOs, and even more PMO-based professional development. After all, who knows better than the PMO staff how to train project resources?

I wrote that last post on my personal computer where I don’t have all the work-related bookmarks stored, so I wanted to come back and add a few links to good articles and information about how successful companies are using collaborative tools to manage people and projects.

From AMR Research, this article grandly titled The Future of Work examines some of the tools out there - and be sure to click on the link where he muses on the difference between MS Office apps and the tools he really needs! (As a recent adopter of Office 07, I can feel his pain.)

On the nuts and bolts end of the spectrum, check out Using Twitter to Track Tasks and Time in Project Server 2007.

I’ll be posting more links on this topic from time to time. Meanwhile: How are you using Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, or a blog to improve your professional cred or keep up with tasks and / or colleagues? And if not … when?

I’m writing this in Paris.

(Okay, you are right, I should not be working.) But an experience today made me want to post here: Two elderly ladies sat down next to me on a park bench in the garden behind Notre Dame, and one remarked that she had seen on television the night before a story about a center for curing children of “Internet intoxication.”

What is wrong with kids today? she said (I’m paraphrasing, and in English, obviously).

Her companion was more thoughtful. Don’t you think they use the Internet because they don’t have the things we had as children? she asked gently, and went on to list those things: the outdoors, safety in the streets, intact families, towns or neighborhoods where everyone knew each other.

I didn’t want to butt in so I didn’t say she was right; but that the Internet can also provide community - an adjunct to community, anyway - if it is properly used. My experiences interacting with my children and friends on Facebook provide one example. In one stroke today I said hello to everyone and told them a little about my trip: what a luxury! and how welcome to those at home.

Not that I approve of children sitting in front of the computer 10 hours a day, of course. But for adults at work, who are going to be in front of a computer 8 hours a day anyway, the social media can add a dimension of closeness and camaraderie that are often missing from offices and companies today. For project managers, an online “community of practice” can be a virtual “PMI Chapter” of learning and advancement. The problem is, few companies utilize these advantages.

In our July Insights newsletter, I listed several links about the pros and cons of telecommuting. One of them - focusing on the cons - was from the CEO of a small company who fretted about Instant Messaging replacing the water cooler. Personally, I think Facebook makes a great water cooler. And my fret is that managers use the difference of connecting virtually with distributed teams as an automatic excuse for failing at it.

The French have a saying: The more things change, the more they remain the same. Every innovation in management or technology has been resisted at first. Virtual teaming and all its tools is just the latest opportunity/problem. Isn’t it time we made excellence in dealing with others virtually one of the pillars of managing projects?

Just curious: how many people reading this ONLY work with people who are co-located with them?

September already! Yesterday I saw my first scarlet maple leaf, artistically arranged on top of a daisy, as if to graphically depict the change of seasons. The university and the high school are back in business in my little town (you can’t miss the traffic on Main St. … or the young, invincible drivers).

And, speaking of education, I’m digging deeper into the data we amassed earlier this year in our Value of Project Management study (and missing Jim Pennypacker’s astute touch at crunching statistics!) and I keep finding more and more interesting facts, particularly about PM training. (If you’ve already downloaded the Research Summary, come back in a couple weeks and redownload it: I’ll be adding additional observations soon).

The study paid special attention to the value of PM training, asking companies to list the ways they provide training (using internal resources, hiring training firms, through colleges and universities, online, etc.) and how much they spend on it. The stunning fact that surfaced when I began to compare results for the top-performing companies with the low performers (these terms and how we arrive at them are explained in the methodology description in the summary) I found that the top performers spend three times as much on project management training as do the companies at the bottom of the heap.

Back to school, anyone?

I’m still digesting that Accenture research on what companies that emerged strongly from the 1990-91 downturn did differently during the bad times. As I said in my previous post, this is one of those business news articles that is all about portfolio management, without ever mentioning it.

I suspect that is because a lot of companies - and many management researchers - don’t know there is a name, a history, a set of standards and best practices - for what they are trying to do.

A key finding, for me, was that the most successful companies had a keen insight into their business. Now, this might sound elementary, but 15 years in business journalism have taught me that business is not as rational as you might think. Companies frequently have no idea what is going on within and across departments; duplication of effort is therefore the norm rather than a fluke; and lacking any systematic measurement system, they also have trouble knowing what is working and what isn’t.

That’s why implementing project portfolio management (PPM) usually results in some AHA! experiences. “You mean … we were doing THAT? … three times?” and the resulting cost savings.

So, PPM is one of those project management tricks that both saves money … and allows companies to invest in some “blue horizon” projects that will carry them forward. A tuck here, and let out a seam there, and you can take the “stitch in time” that lays the ground for growth.

But, there’s another aspect of PPM that’s also in line with the research linked to in my earlier post. With apologies for the resolution on this graphic, check out the Portfolio Scorecard model we proposed in our book, Seven Steps to Strategy Execution:

Balancing with realism means taking resources into consideration

Now, usually, you’d see the profitable projects (”bread and butter” projects is one nickname for these) and the necessary ones in two blocks of that square. But, in fact, they fall into the same category. You are going to do these things … no matter what. Either they are required, or they make money (rarely both) and so they are IN.

What’s missing from the balance equation in many models is the upper left quadrant: Do we have the capacity to do this? The people, the skills, the cash … the software, the space, the ideas: the resources that, without which any list of projects is just a wish list.

Everyone is writing about how business can thrive in spite of the downturn … including me. We’re working on a new white paper on the ways that project management discipline can help companies contain costs and become more efficient. (You’ll be able to read it here on or before August 13). But something about the whole idea made me antsy, because merely cutting and thinning and pruning isn’t enough. You’ve got to add the sunshine and fertilizer, too.

And, in fact, research into the ways strong companies have survived previous economic upsets, shows that, indeed “You can’t shrink your way to greatness.”

I was reminded that great Tom Peters quote from Circle of Innovation many times this spring as I watched the unemployment figures rise.

So I went looking for other evidence that greater success - or at the very least, a more sustainable form of success - is created when companies both prune judiciously and invest creatively in their own future.

And I found it.

It’s pretty extensive research, so explore the link yourself, but just to give a precis, companies that flourished coming out of a recession in the early 90s:

• They cut the RIGHT costs .. and did not engage in self-defeating cost-cutting.
• They leveraged their IT systems to gain insight into the business
• They collaborated with stakeholders … instead of pursuing projects/products dreamed up in a vacuum
• They killed or refused the RIGHT projects and opportunities … also based on insight into their own finances, markets, capacity, and so on.
• Rather than merely shrinking - via cost and headcount cuts - they invested in innovative products and processes.

This is one of those articles that never mentions project, program, or portfolio management. You wouldn’t find it if you searched under those terms. Yet, take another look at that list … are we not talking project and portfolio management here?

More rants on why PM/PPM can not just save, but grow, your business … coming soon.

Just as I completed my last post, a colleague sent me an article with the very timely title “Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Things that Never Happen” - which was my argument for why PMOs often succeed themselves out of business.

The article, from 2001, focuses on quality management initiatives, but it isn’t hard to read between the lines and see how project management initiatives are subject to the same forces. That process improvements often improve themselves out of existence, leaving the organization less well off than hoped, the authors term “the improvement paradox.”

And yet, when the authors note that the failure of organizations to profit over time from process improvements isn’t traceable to just one factor, but to “the interaction of tools, equipment, workers and managers,” the project management cheerleader in me can’t help but note that the integration of all these factors would be simpler in a company with a solid PM culture … the kind of culture you build through having a mature enterprise PMO in place.

Okay, now for the news: You may have noticed that the link to our PMO research report no longer goes to the CBP bookstore. That’s because my sidekick of nearly 15 years, Jim Pennypacker, has gone off to start his own publishing firm and all the Center for Business Practices content has been moved under the PM Solutions flag. Our books are still available through Amazon.com; research summaries are posted here. Please reset your bookmarks for our research content to these urls, and join me in wishing all the best to Jim in his new venture.

I wish this were not true, but ever since 2002 when we began facilitating project management benchmarking groups, I have been meeting PMO directors who brought project management to the attention to senior management, created PMOs or Centers of Excellence, drove PM improvements across organizations, improved project and portfolio performance … and wound up unemployed.

Of course, the present economic climate puts every area of the organization under the microscope, but it does seem that PMOs are more susceptible to the ax than many other functions. My theory about this is that great project (or program) management is like great editing: invisible. When the management of projects, programs, or portfolios goes smoothly …. nothing dramatic happens. Things get done, decisions get made, money gets made, schedules are met. No problem. No bloopers, no typos.

“Hey,” says the CEO. “Everything is going so well. What do we need this PMO for? It’s overhead.”

The latest cover story in PM Network magazine focuses on just this issue: the crucial requirement for PMOs to show value, and show it often, in order to simply maintain their place in the organization. (The Accident Fund PMO, by the way, has been a finalist and a winner of our PMO of the Year Award in previous years, under the previous director Norm Buckwalter–something that isn’t mentioned in the article).

Often, PMOs succumb to a disease that is affecting all areas of organizations: the short-term CEO syndrome. Research by executive search firm Drake Beam Morin notes that when CEO tenure drops, businesses focus on achieving quick and short-term results. Since (as our 2008 study The State of the PMO revealed), it’s only mature PMOs that bring business benefits, it’s easy to see how short-term thinking can doom PMOs. Unfortunately, this only harms organizations in the long run.

Have a PMO success-to-sadness story? I’m all ears.