Project and Program Management

A Competency-Based Approach, Fourth Edition

Mitchell L. Springer

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781557538581
• eBook ISBN: 9781612495712
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Choosing the right people tocarry out a project is essential to its success. When multiple projects arecombined into a complex program, the human aspect becomes even more important.This book is the first to truly balance a complete account of the technicalaspects of project and program management with a practical approach tounderstanding and developing the core competencies required to accomplishdesired goals. On the technical side, this bookis a complete introduction to predicting costs, setting schedules, andassessing risks. On the people side, it sheds new light on how to molddifferent personality types into a team, how to motivate the team's members, andhow to produce extraordinary results. The author details the essential parts ofthe program management approach, describing the best way to define, organize, and schedule the work to be done, identifying risks and controlling costsduring the whole process.

This fourth edition hasbeen significantly revised, with every chapter updated. The volume considersthe magnitude of recent social, political, and technological changes, and theimpact is represented throughout this book. Included are insights from numerousstudents who bring to the forefront their current real-world practices fromtheir individual businesses, industries, and disciplines.

Chapter 1

Program/Project Management Competencies

Every discipline, to be a discipline, must have competencies. Competencies define the behaviors indicative of what is required to be successful in the respective discipline. Competencies, then, allow us to judge ourselves in terms of how much we know about a given competency, which, in turn, allows us to pursue a better understanding of a given competency through training and education. In other words, since competencies are nothing more than manifested behaviors, which we can form through training, competencies are things we can develop in ourselves and others. The question to be asked, however, is what are the agreed-to competencies of a given discipline?

The answer to the question “what are the required program/project management competencies for success in practice?” is not uniformly agreed upon. In fact, looking through the proliferation of literature, it appears there is not a single set of program/project management competencies agreed to by all. What we can do, however, is to pull from the many already defined competencies a set that we can then apply our own experience to create an acceptable set. Certainly, without question, we can define the basic competencies. So, to this end, this book defines the basic competencies and a few others oriented around successful leaders and leadership that is proposed to form a complete set of program/project management competencies.

J. Davidson Frame, in his 1999 book entitled Building Project Management Competence, defines eleven competencies program/project managers must possess to ensure at least some facsimile of, or opportunity for, success. These eleven competencies are:

Be results oriented

Have a head for details

Possess a strong commitment to the project

Be aware of the organization’s goals

Be politically savvy

Be cost-conscious

Understand business basics

Be capable of addressing needs of staff, customers, and management

Be capable of dealing with ambiguity, setbacks, and disappointments

Possess good negotiation skills

Possess the appropriate technical skills to do the job

Frame goes on to separate competencies into three categories: knowledge-based, socially rooted, and business-judgment.

According to Frame, knowledge-based competencies are objective knowledge that individuals are expected to possess in order to carry out their jobs effectively. An Ada programmer should know something about Ada as a programming language; a restaurant owner should know something about running a restaurant; and a builder should know something about building a house.

Socially rooted competencies are more subjective as defined by Frame. He writes, “They focus on abilities such as good judgment and human relations skills. Task leaders who are able to mediate conflicts on their teams possess some measure of socially rooted competence, as do project managers who can motivate borrowed resources to put in needed extra hours of work and technical workers who display sensitivity to their customers need” (p. 6).

The last category of program/project management competencies are business-judgment competencies. These are “tied to the ability of individuals to make decisions to consistently serve the best business interest of the organization. People who are strong in this area are able to assess the risks and rewards associated with decisions they are about to make. They look beyond the immediate impact of their decisions and understand their opportunity costs. Although they recognize the importance of establishing and following good methods and procedures for the effective functioning of the organization, they do not behave like mindless bureaucrats. When they see an opportunity to improve the business performance, they seize it, even when it lies outside the realm of business procedures” (p. 6).

Harold Kerzner, in his 2009, tenth edition book entitled Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling, defines ten skills he believes project managers must possess to be effective in their pursuits. These ten skills are:

Team building

Leadership

Conflict resolution

Technical expertise

Planning

Organization

Entrepreneurship

Administration

Management support

Resource allocation

Kerzner goes on to say that “it is important the personal management style underlying these skills facilitate the integration of multidisciplinary program resources for synergistic operation. The days of the manager who gets by with technical expertise alone or pure administrative skills are gone” (p. 905).

Others, and there are many, have separated a program/project manager’s competencies into two categories of leadership and those specific to program/project management, although there seems to be much confusion on a common set of defined competencies. Others have added the following competencies, some derived from the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) definitions:

Strategic thinking

Customer focus

Business alignment

Domain knowledge

Decision making

Ethical behavior

Self-management

Global awareness

Risk and opportunity management

Program planning and execution

Over the last thirty-plus years of teaching program/project management, professional working adult learners have been asked to build competency models in much the same manner as is being described here. They were asked to visit online organizations, download their respective competency model for program/project managers, and then compare and contrast their findings. Ultimately, they have been asked to create their own version of a “good” competency model from their research findings and their own personal experiences. Below are the guidelines provided to students for these many papers.

Student PM Competency Model Paper Guidelines

1.Research and document three program/project management-oriented competency models. These can generally be found on the internet.

2.From the above three researched models, create your own (fourth) perspective of what behaviors, and skills per behavior, are most important, or, alternatively, you can use your current company competency model as this fourth model; your choice.

3.You should have three to five behaviors and three to five skills per behavior in your fourth model.

4.You should define three (3) levels of program/project manager; example, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3. For each level of PM define:

a.Experience required

b.Education required or desired

c.Size of programs responsible for; value ($$), complexity, etc.

d.Type of program responsible for; component, subsystem, system, platform, etc.

5.You will deliver one (1) item; a Word document—if you wish to send me an Excel file from which you cut and pasted into your master Word document you may do that as well, but I will only be looking at and grading the Word file. Summarizing, submit:

a.A complete Microsoft Word document that documents your three researched models found (placing one researched model per ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Author
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Program/Project Management Competencies
• Chapter 2: The Importance of Program/Project Management
• Chapter 3: Process Management—Evolution and Definition
• Chapter 4: Contract Types—What Type of Contract Should I Enter Into?
• Chapter 5: The Bidding Process—Obtaining a Price Quote
• Chapter 6: Defining the Work to be Performed
• Chapter 7: Scheduling and Staffing the Work
• Chapter 8: Risk Management—Mitigating the Impact
• Chapter 9: Disruptive Technologies—Thinking Outside of the Box
• Chapter 10: Cost, Schedule, and Performance Management—A Quantitative Premise
• Chapter 11: Multiple Generations in the Workplace—It’s How We Grew Up
• Chapter 12: Connecting Generational Cohorts to Associative Thinking
• Chapter 13: Leadership and Gender—A Science-Based Understanding
• Chapter 14: Motivation and Leadership—Why We Do What We Do
• Chapter 15: Organization Design Models—Not Right or Wrong, More or Less Applicable
• Chapter 16: Building Teams—Understanding Ourselves and Others through MBTI
• Chapter 17: Capitalizing on the Collective Knowledge of the World
• Chapter 18: Establishing Program/Project Management as a Discipline
• Chapter 19: Managers, Leaders, and Entrepreneurs
• Chapter 20: The American Social Economic Context
• Chapter 21: Career Development—Models
• Chapter 22: Succession Planning—Providing Opportunities for Growth
• Chapter 23: The Business Case for Diversity and Inclusivity
• Chapter 24: Effective Communication Skills
• Chapter 25: Change Management—People, the Hardest Part
• Appendix A: Evaluating the Program Plan
• Appendix B: Executing the Program Plan
• Appendix C: Changes to the Program Plan
• Appendix D: Program Planning Master Process Flow
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index