PMO of the Year Award Enters Countdown Phase

May 31, 2011 | by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

For those of our readers who are entering the PMO of the Year Award, May has been a busy time; we hope that last week's deadline extension (to June 10) has allowed you to polish your entry without giving up the holiday weekend. Please remember to check out the Linked In group for PMOY applicants, where many FAQs about preparing an application are archived.

Speaking of award winners - the recent release of our new research study, The State of Project Management Training 2011, has caused me to reflect on the reasons why last year's winner, the IBM Project Management Community of Practice, so impressed our panel of judges. Not only did the IBM PMCoP have a stellar history of expanding project management capability throughout the global corporation, but they have implemented a program to link training investments to improved business performance. This is the kind of strategic mindset that the judges look for in PMO of the Year winners ... yet many organizations, while understanding that PM training is valuable to the organization, fail to connect the dots by developing measures that definitively link improved knowledge and practice to an improved bottom line.

In a series of follow-up interviews about the survey results, carried out last week, I noticed that quite often, my interview subjects seemed to go off topic when asked how they measured the effectiveness of training. I noticed that, for those with strong project management backgrounds, they tended to provide an answer that spoke to how they measured project performance ... while those from a training mindset told me how they measured the participants' perceived value of the training. Both of these sets of data are important, of course: but neither answers the question the CEO is asking himself/herself: "What business benefits am I getting for these training dollars?"

Wise project management training functions will take creating these measures as their next key step.

For more about the training study, please join us for a free webinar examining the results on June 9th.

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