October 2009
When deciding to seek independent programme management, some organisations need to think much harder about the real skills-gap they intend to fill
Amongst the changes brought about by the banking collapse and subsequent recession is a significant increase in the numbers of available specialist resources. We all know of people who have been subject to redundancy from permanent roles and who have decided to 'do some contracting' while the permanent employment market recovers.
The quid pro quo, of course, is that there are now many more people available to resource those programmes and projects that are being commissioned. This creates a volume problem for clients. It's not unheard of for recruiting managers to receive over 250 CVs for every role.
In response, many roles are being defined in ever-tighter terms: the ideal candidate must have excellent project management skills AND Prince2 AND interpersonal skills AND specific functional process knowledge AND specific IT systems knowledge AND specific industry knowledge AND speak 2 languages other than English AND etc etc.
If a logistics organisation needs to implement a new distribution management system it's highly likely that they have plenty of in-house expertise in the relevant technology and functional expertise in distribution management and logistics. What they may lack, however, is dedicated project management expertise - in other words, the ability to organise resources and activity against a defined timescale to achieve a specific business outcome.
That's not to say that project managers never require specific industry, process or systems knowledge under any circumstances; simply that organisations often have plenty of specialist industry and technical skills readily available. What they frequently lack is the expertise to manage diverse internal and external resources against a systematic workplan. Project and programme management is a sophisticated skill. Trading it off in favour of specific systems or industry experience can have unforeseen negative consequences, and in the current climate organisations needs their programmes to be 'done once, and done right'.
