Project Managers are critical resources in any project driven organization. Usual career development plans focusing on training programs are not sufficient for project managers.
Improvement opportunities for Project management arise from different stake holders such as customers, manager, team and also from activities such as quality audits/ retrospectives. These improvements are identified at a surface level rather than from a detailed in depth understanding of practices. Usual management review process tends to focus more on project rather than the project manager as an Individual.
Project health check is a practice, where an experienced project specialist works with Project manager and uses an assessment methodology to assess the project performance. This also identifies opportunities for improvement. Where the improvements relate to the competencies of Project manager, mentoring by the specialist will be of great help. While the specialist can be drawn from with in organisation, an external specialist will be more effective as such an individual can work without any bias and constraints on time. For mentoring to be effective, both the management and project manager need to have faith in the mentoring process and the external specialist.
As organizations are forced to move from time and material business models to fixed price/outcome based models, due to the business dynamics, the expectation on PMs are increasing. Institutionalization of Project health checks and mentoring will be a worthwhile investment.
What has been your experience with mentoring of project managers?
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| Photo: Mashup of Images from Commons |
Improvement opportunities for Project management arise from different stake holders such as customers, manager, team and also from activities such as quality audits/ retrospectives. These improvements are identified at a surface level rather than from a detailed in depth understanding of practices. Usual management review process tends to focus more on project rather than the project manager as an Individual.
Project health check is a practice, where an experienced project specialist works with Project manager and uses an assessment methodology to assess the project performance. This also identifies opportunities for improvement. Where the improvements relate to the competencies of Project manager, mentoring by the specialist will be of great help. While the specialist can be drawn from with in organisation, an external specialist will be more effective as such an individual can work without any bias and constraints on time. For mentoring to be effective, both the management and project manager need to have faith in the mentoring process and the external specialist.
As organizations are forced to move from time and material business models to fixed price/outcome based models, due to the business dynamics, the expectation on PMs are increasing. Institutionalization of Project health checks and mentoring will be a worthwhile investment.
What has been your experience with mentoring of project managers?
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