Building a credible, capable and competent workforce – an enterprise-level approach. Part 1

One of the more enlightening conversations I can remember having with a board of directors was when I was suggesting that perhaps, given that the company was in a remarkably bad position at the time, we should look at the competence of the people managing our projects. We had just written off around £700 million in underperforming projects, so there was certainly some evidence that the competency of the workforce was questionable – indeed, KPMG had been employed to identify the reasons behind the failure, one of which was reported as being that the ‘wrong PM’ had been appointed. But what do we mean by the ‘wrong’ PM? What would ‘right’ look like?

There were many varied reasons behind the poor performance of the organisation but, ultimately, asking an expert to leave behind their specialism and manage a project without significant input on how to manage a project, its people and its finances, is courting disaster. It seems blindingly obvious that a project manager needs to be competent in managing a project, but that’s the problem with the blindingly obvious – it’s blinding! So, let’s take the proverbial ‘blinkers’ off, and explore a method for determining the true competence of your project management community.

There’s a lot to say on this topic, so I’m splitting this post in two: part 1 offers some guidance on defining a job family and selecting the right competencies; part 2 looks at creating a rating system that works for your organisation, along with a suggested starting point.

Getting started

For the first step, I recommend a professional review of the job family within which the PM community reside. At the basic level, a job family is simply a method of categorising employees into groups that share a common skill or type of work. Grouping people by job family, as opposed to division grade or location, is a powerful way of creating communities of practice which can be utilised for many different initiatives. Then, ask yourself: does the job family cover project, programme and portfolio (P3) levels? How many of the personnel in the job family have job titles that are truly part of the PM role? How will those roles change/evolve in the future, particularly if the reason for your review is as part of a transformational change for your organisation, and so o