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Individual or Organisational Capability – Is the gulf between the two impossible to bridge?
Eddie Kilkelly, Operations Director of ILX Group plc, explores how organisations can deliver improvements in business capability without undermining individual development and losing the best staff

Since the project management method PRINCE2 and its associated examination scheme were introduced in 1996, over 300,000 people worldwide have become PRINCE2 qualified. But many people are asking, so what? Despite the large number of people with a project management qualification, there is a nagging question as to whether all this training is actually having an impact on making the whole business more capable than it was before. Is it simply that newly qualified project managers can negotiate higher salaries from employers? To make matters worse, there are still only a handful of organisations that have attempted to measure – using the PRINCE2 Maturity Model - the effectiveness of individual training on the organisation as a whole.

On one hand, individual qualifications and the resulting potential for improving career prospects provide the incentive for people to pursue and complete training to the required standard. On the other hand, Capability Maturity Models have been developed to assess the effectiveness of an organisation in applying a process activity. Clearly both are important. But unless individual training and development processes are aligned with, and embedded into business processes, there is little hope that all this project management training will prove effective for the business, rather than just for the individual. Companies all strive to improve their capability and so the question that every organisation should ask itself is: Does the development of the individual result in improved organisational capability?

Does Process equal Capability?
Plenty of work has been done by standards organisations, such as the BSI and ISO, which shows that in order to measure capability, a business must have a process to measure against. This is needed so that the business can determine that what it is doing is the right approach and that it is achieving the standards it has set. These processes must also include a degree of measurable self improvement. But critically, these processes must be embedded into the business and so into the way individuals work. If not, managers will struggle to make them work or worse will not accept them and will continue to follow their own ways of working. This is where and how the gulf between individual and organisational capability exists.

Bridging the capability gap
Organisations need to have a clear picture of the most appropriate sequence of events and there is always more than one choice.

The traditional approach has been to train everyone involved with projects in PRINCE2 to introduce some consistency. This way everyone shares the same process and terminology and, in theory, can make a valuable contribution. But therein is the problem. There will be as many different opinions as there are project staff, so it could take over a year to develop a consistent approach by which time the newly qualified staff will have forgotten what they learned. This can then result in staff who are disillusioned, who have fallen into bad habits or who have gone back to their old ways of working.

Alternately, businesses can proactively define their own ‘new’ process based upon PRINCE2 principles, develop a training programme and then implement it. This approach will be highly tailored to the company’s needs, but it is likely to take a long time and is likely to involve a substantial change in terminology and process and winning the hearts and minds of stakeholders could be an additional hurdle.

At ILX we are constantly coming up against this problem of aligning individual and organisational capability and our approach is to assess the organisation’s current capability against the PRINCE2 Maturity Model. The advantage is that in a very short space of time, organisations can identify what currently works well for their organisation, what is weak and where the gaps and inconsistencies are in their processes. They can also quickly address discrepancies in their local terminology and can align all of these issues with the PRINCE2 best practice framework. The outcome from this exercise would be an action plan of the items to address in priority order and would include any training required to support the programme.

This approach sends a clear and positive message to employees - what we already have works, how do we make it great and with minimal disruption to the business? It also means that any training and development they do, has a meaningful and useful context within the business and aligns individual development and capabilities much closer to those of the business.

Taking a measured approach
Achieving individual recognition will always provide a personal motivator to successfully complete a course of study. However, the skills gained must be directly relevant and integrate with business processes in order that full advantage can be taken of them and this is equally important to ensure that the individual has the opportunity to practice and develop these new skills.

ILX has developed a simple model which has proved very successful in helping businesses introduce any new capability:

Formally measure your organisation against an existing benchmark standard to identify what work is needed
Target your effort on the identified gaps in your existing capability
Build your Action Plans for improvement around the identified areas of weakness
Develop training plans to support the above Action Plans to include qualifications where appropriate
Seek accreditation for your organisation against the original model to close the development loop and provide a basis for continual improvement

There is no question that business process methods like PRINCE2 has been transformative in terms of improving the way organisations operate and in increasing productivity and efficiency. But organisations that deploy these techniques also need to ensure that they measure how effective those techniques are and that the aspirations of individual employees to improve their own career prospects are made an essential part of the overall business improvement process. Then there is a very good chance that we can start to bridge the gap between individual and organisational capability.