Published on the 20/03/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
A gradual erosion in IT project management skills, which has taken place over the last decade, is now threatening the ability of companies to keep pace with competitors…
Chief information officers have been warned to take stock of the skills and experience of their IT project managers as the IT investment cycle picks up. Nick Mescher, chief executive of UXC Consulting, released a white paper and presented at the NSW IT Leaders’ Summit this week, warning that the skills base of IT project managers had been compromised over the last decade.
Mescher said that in the early 2000s many organisations devolved a series of aspects of project management establishing vendor management groups, HR teams equipped to deal with IT related change management, communications groups charged with relaying information about IT projects and procurement groups responsible for IT purchasing. This he said had turned many IT project managers into project schedulers.
He told iStart this week that in the wake of the global financial crisis many of those project management support functions had been wound back.
While this did not lead to major problems at the time, because there were fewer IT projects being funded, Mescher warned that now that IT projects were being kickstarted, the experience gap was causing a problem. “My concern is that we have not skilled the project management workforce adequately. Project delivery will be seriously at risk because of this,” said Mescher.
He warned that this would impact businesses’ ability to innovate. “Business is more and more dependent on IT solutions and if they are seeing IT as a game changer then if they are not able to deliver they are getting further behind their competition.”
Having project managers who were only performing a project scheduling role would not meet the needs of most organisations he warned.
Mescher said that many project managers were well aware of the issue, and that about 20 percent of them were sufficiently confident to approach their managers for either support or training to beef up their skills. However he said that in most cases CIOs or the head of project services teams needed to take ownership of the issue and run through a checklist of project management skills and experience with their staff in order to identify any gaps that could hold back the organisation.
Mescher’s paper Project Delivery: Where have all the skills gone? can be downloaded here.
