One of the definite benefits of undertaking professional project management training in whichever discipline you choose is that if you have a good education base, knowledge and working experience of what it takes to get a project delivered on schedule and budget. With this skill, you will almost certainly never find yourself unemployed. There is always a project somewhere: an airport being built, a system to be put in, and a process to re-evaluate and improve. If you have a strong project management background with all of the right ticks in boxes when it comes to project methodologies and people skills, you will be in high demand. When considering expanding your project management capabilities and experience what are the key elements that you should consider? Well the reality in most cases is that the project management methodologies available to a project manager are often decided on long before a project commences. In many cases it may be an in house methodology based on “this is what we've always done". At other times, the decision is based on a companywide initiative to adopt a particular process. Regardless, it is important to know the various project management methodologies if for no other reason than to be aware of the where their strengths lie and where they come apart. There are lots of multi disciplined methodologies to choose from, if you are going to be a project management expert and command the highest remuneration for your efforts it is important that you have at least background knowledge of all of the key methodologies that you may experience – this requires constant training. The credibility that you will command by having in-depth domain knowledge in your specialist area of project management will help you secure more interesting work at a higher pay grade in the majority of cases. That’s not it though. Being a good and effective project manager doesn’t stop with the domain knowledge, regardless of the approach employed. Careful consideration needs to be given to the element of project teams and how you work with them to deliver your desired objective. It’s a fact of life that many projects fail to meet their delivery deadline or their business objective, and in the vast majority of situations this comes down to people skills and communication training within the project management team. Understanding how to get the best out of people, motivate a team and pull the proverbial “cat out of the bag” will win you respect, relationships and importantly result in you looking back on success rather than failure. It is for this exact reason that many companies focus on effective communications training, including programs such as NLP, Visual Thinking for project teams and Emotional Intelligence. Most importantly it’s vital to realize that people want experts, so if you can maintain a good all round capability whilst at the same time undertaking niche project management training for a specific project type you are more likely to get ahead. Understanding the business drivers around different projects will help you to communicate more effectively with your paymasters. Being able to explain why a deadline is not realistic in a way that they can understand and relate to, will also assist your career progression. When it comes to the type of training that you need to undertake to be at the top of your chosen profession, it’s important to strike the right balance between on the job training, listening to your co-workers and of course structured training programs. I am a great advocate of classroom training that involves practitioners using different methodologies from different industry sectors learning as a group and sharing past experiences and techniques. These types of sessions, for me, really deliver an effective project management training combining theory with the key elements of real world experiences. A project methodology tells you what you have to do, to manage your projects from start to finish. It describes every step in the project life cycle in depth, so you know exactly which tasks to complete when. It does not however, tell you how to convince the boss that two weeks is not an achievable goal without cutting major safety corners that could cost the business much more money than the project delay. In my business we run between ten and twenty concurrent projects, most of these projects will be complex technology projects with surprises, issues and snags involved in them. That of course is the nature of the business. In my experience you have two distinct types of project managers. The ‘yes man’ that will just agree to my demands and always give you the good news up until the date the project goes live and will then look around for escape routes when the project misses its deadline. On the opposite side of the coin, you have the project managers that are always looking for errors, omissions and problems that could affect the project. In my experience I will always choose the latter, as it is clearly advantageous to know of potential problems in advance so they can be dealt with and planned for before a deadline is missed. A well trained business, savvy project manager, will understand that and won’t be frightened to tell you how it is. ‘How’ he tells it, is of course a key component of how we work together. Project managers that have business training combined with the soft skills required to work with both internal personnel and external customers are always in demand. So when I am interviewing project managers to define what level of training in both project management and the business they have, I always ask about multiple methodologies and what they think that makes a successful project manager. Training is a key element for me. If project managers have not read the latest book on project management, or if they are not up to date with the latest project methodologies, I don’t consider them as professional, and subsequently they will be leaving my office jobless. In summary, a project manager should be constantly subjected to training, which includes formalized training courses, on the job training, listening to their peers, asking questions, self reading and constant evaluation. With this level of training in the project management disciplines I am delighted to have them on my team. 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One of the definite benefits of undertaking professional project management training in whichever discipline you choose is that if you have a good education base, knowledge and working experience of what it takes to get a project delivered on schedule and budget. With this skill, you will almost certainly never find yourself unemployed. There is always a project somewhere: an airport being built, a system to be put in, and a process to re-evaluate and improve.
Ben Hubert is author of this article on Training Dubai. Find more information about UAE Training here.
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