Capability - the Third Pillar of the Enterprise-wide PBM House of Excellence
The third of the four major pillars in the PBMO house of excellence is the part of the structure that evaluates the impact that individual and corporate capabilities have on the establishment of enterprise-wide project management. The PBMO assesses the organization's competency and capability measurement and development, education, training and career path development. It also includes use of the work breakdown structure tool, integration of project management information systems, and earned value methodology. All of these are key ingredients for successfully building enterprise-wide project management practices within organizations of all sizes.
Enterprise Capabilities
To have capabilities in project business management implies that specific requisite capabilities are identified, developed, and maintained over time.[3] What is also needed is the competency in the enterprise's management and staff to perform that project business management implementation and application. To ascertain that competency exists requires an assessment of the capabilities of the personnel at all levels of the enterprise involved. To develop personnel capabilities that are missing, require improving or updating to achieve a higher level of competence, the enterprise must have a training and education program related to the topics of project business management. The training and education program is most effective when integrated as part of the career path development for those personnel the enterprise deem to be qualified to become project, program, or portfolio managers.
What is Competence in Management?
Evaluating project business management personnel competencies can identify persons who are, or have the potential to become, superior portfolio, program, or project managers. These evaluations can determine what is needed in the way of training, education, and career development for each person to raise their performance levels. When project management personnel have superior competency levels, programs and projects are managed more effectively, increasing the probability of project success and a higher return on project investment. The development of project management skills will enable an organization to build a team of experienced and trained managers capable of taking on multiple projects and helping their customers achieve their goals.
Measuring portfolio, program, and project management competencies and benchmarking them against recognized project business management best practices is the first step in developing an effective project business management-training program. This step is required to achieve the highest level of competency in all areas.
Portfolio, Program, and Project Management Career Paths
The performance of project business management processes and activities is concerned with project team members successfully completing a set of deliverables to achieve the business objectives of a project. Project team members, referred to as project human resources, provide the skills and experience required to complete the technical work of projects to produce the products, services or results for which the project was authorized. The knowledge and skills required to produce the technical work of projects is typically obtained through formal technical training or on-the-job training that is provided or paid for by the enterprise.
Project business management is typically the specialization and responsibility of an individual manager selected to head the project. Project managers lead project teams, but in many cases they also often perform project activities that directly produce deliverables. Project managers oversee and coordinate the project work and productive interaction among team members (technical resources). The knowledge, skills and experience of individual managers who lead the planning and execution of portfolios, programs and projects require specialized training that until recent years was typically obtained primarily through on-the job-training. Obtaining Bachelor, Masters and Doctorial degrees in project management is now becoming a common offering from more colleges and universities than existed ten years ago.
3. A large portion of my book "The Power of Enterprise-Wide Project Management" discusses specific organizational process asset capabilities needed to implement and apply project business management.
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Iterative Management Processes
