PM Competency Development at a Large Services Company

PM Competency development at a Large Services Company

Our customer is a large global IT Services company, providing end-to-end IT solutions to its customers in diverse verticals such as:

• Banking, Financial Services and Insurance
• Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail
• Manufacturing
• Travel, Hospitality and Transportation

Background

The customer faced a challenge from their customers’ perspective – while their customers were, by and large, satisfied with their technical competence, there was regular feedback that Project Management was an area of concern. The client had to address a major area of improvement that came from their customer satisfaction surveys. This had to do with lower than expected PM competencies of their project managers, resulting in customer expectations on project planning and tracking not being met. The company turned to PM Power to help them deal with this issue and get their customer satisfaction ratings up. Read on to know how we helped them…

PM Power Approach and Solutions

PM Power addressed the issue of PM competence shortfalls with a well-designed Project Management Competence initiative developed around the ProMentorSM framework. PM Power approached this as a three-phase solution:

Phase 1 involving the following two key aspects:

• An intensive 5-day workshop (called PM@work) on Project Management essentials using a case study driven approach with assessment using quizzes, case studies, other exercises during PM@work
• Development of individual competency development plans for each individual based on workshop performance as well as inputs from the concerned line manager using a customized PM Power developed ProMentorSM questionnaire

Phase 2 involving mentoring and coaching to target project managers to address gaps in proficiency identified in their respective competency development plans and to ensure trained project managers applied concepts and skills learned to real-life project situations.

Phase 3 involving final assessment of PM competency of individuals using a combination of an application oriented examination and feedback from the concerned line manager using the ProMentorSM questionnaire.

PM Power’s approach has benefited over sixty project managers over a two-year period. Customer’s analysis has shown strong evidence that projects managed by managers who have gone through the PM competency development program tended to go into crisis situations less often than in other cases. Customer feedback has also improved in these cases. The customer requested for PM Power’s assistance in developing the next level of managers as well which is under way.