Trial by stealth

There is a battle being fought for the hearts and minds of our Project Management community — and it’s going to affect both the future project performance and our financial success in the world markets! It is a strange battle with unexpected alliances and it is all the more worrying for its stealth.

So who are the combatants?

In the red corner is the main player, a company confusingly called the APM Group. Confusing because it has no connection with the Association for Project Management (APM), and has no mandate from the project management community. The APM Group, hired by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) to manage the accreditation of trainers and training companies to deliver PRINCE2TM and Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) courses, is promoting method accreditation as though it is a project management qualification — as if knowing a method makes you a project manager. PRINCE2 is a good method, and MSP benefits from it being the only widely documented programme management approach, but to confuse it with project management is like believing that knowing how to do double-entry bookkeeping makes you a qualified accountant. And, for commercial reasons, many of the authorised training organisations (ATOs), who have invested substantial sums of money buying accreditation, are promoting the same message.

In the blue corner are organisations that include the APM, some of the progressive universities — in particular Middlesex (which has established the National Centre for Project Management (NCPM)), the University of Manchester (formally UMIST) and Lancaster — and a small number of project management companies, all of whom are dedicated to developing professional project management. These ‘blue’ organisations know that high performance project management is a critical success factor for UK plc, and are seeking to put in place a set of qualifications that mean that those with them can run projects — safely and predictably. It has taken time and much research, some funded by the national and international project management associations, to develop a consistent view about what makes a good project manager. There remains work to be done, but consensus is swiftly growing about their attributes and hence a professional curriculum and valid assessment criteria can be created.

So what’s the problem?

It’s the difference between education and training. Not sure what the difference is? Just check your reaction to your child coming home and saying that they had sex training rather than sex education at school today! The ‘reds’ claim that some 50,000 individuals sit the PRINCE2 tests every year, while the ‘blues’ would be hard pressed to find 5,000 taking advanced project management qualifications worldwide. We need to worry that the personal development budgets for future project managers is being consumed by training programmes, when it could be better spent in educating them in project management. 

Senior executives want people skilled at running projects. People skilled at running projects are distinguished by their attitudes, their skills, the responsibilities they intuitively accept, and the tasks and procedures they follow. It is also a well-researched finding that the best predictor of project performance is level of previous project experience. None of these are the outcomes from the typical five-day accreditation training course, including two days of tests. As any experienced trainer knows, it is much easier to get a twenty-something through method accreditation that focuses on vocabulary, and knowledge of procedures, than a more experienced individual — the inexperienced don’t see the confounding factors that have to be taken into account.

What project management education does is develop judgement and attitudes. It focuses on disciplines, not procedures, and forces focus on the factors that lead to success in projects. There is a place for procedures. They are the distilled wisdom from hundreds of man years of others’ experience, but they are not rules, they are guidance — something that someone whose only exposure to project management is a method course and their anecdotal experiences, shaped by that method, rarely grasps. Therein lies a real threat to project management development in the UK. As has been observed in many organisations, the only difference between a methodologist and a terrorist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist…

What to do then?

The first and most important thing is to make the case for developing project management expertise, rather than project method expertise. The major project management organisations, such as the APM, the IAPM and the PMI, must make their cases much clearer and deliver to the marketplace clear guidelines about what good project management education should look like. Both the APM and the PMI have long-standing entry level knowledge programmes that are preferable starting points for project management education, but they suffer from many of the same faults as the method accreditation courses, with a public image that attaining these underwrites some sort of professional status in project management when they patently do not.

In this country the OGC, with its clear mandate to improve project management in the government sector, must clearly associate itself with providers of project management education and promote this at least as heavily as it has for method accreditation. And project managers who value their contribution to their organisations and to their country should demand loud and clear that they are professionals and expect professional status with all that comes with it — recognition, responsibility and qualifications.

After all, the Olympics are coming, the demand for advanced, high-performance, professional project management in all spheres will be at a premium and we are not going to get it from individuals who are expert in PRINCE2 but cannot project-manage.

The most desirable outcome would be for the OGC to integrate method training in its education programme and eliminate the monopoly on PRINCE2, or preferably transfer it to the APM. The OGC should make sure the accreditation is embedded and is made a component of project management education.