Most project management professionals are diligent about improving their competencies when it comes to planning, budget management, and other core disciplines. Are many of them also cultivating the skills necessary to address a project crisis? It’s true that appropriate preparation will avoid the majority of these kinds of incidents, but in the real world some pieces of the project puzzle may fall outside a Project Team’s direct control. If a project goes off the rails, has your project management team built the expertise to get it back on track?
The what: Effective crisis management—particularly where a large, complex, or high-visibility project is concerned—requires a very specific combination of skills and knowledge. Unique project control strategies may be needed, it may be necessary to manage a purposeful disruption of linked or dependent activities, the approach to project execution could evolve as the project comes back into focus, and downstream effects may need to be managed differently than in a typical project.
The why: Project management training typically places significant emphasis on avoiding problems. And while that’s a valid and useful approach, it’s unrealistic to assume that crisis management skills will never be needed. Troubled projects very often occur in (or sometimes cause) chaotic environments where panic may be a dominant emotion. Against the difficult backdrop of an alarmed or flustered organization, managing cost and resource problems and communicating across disparate project groups requires a different skill set than executing a project in a normal setting.
The how: Seek out a trainer who can draw on a foundation of strong project management methodology, and who has real-world expertise in bringing out-of-control projects back to a manageable state. From this basis of experience, the instructor can then help students develop specific skills designed to interrupt faulty processes and effectively turn a troubled project around.
PMAlliance has a national open enrollment training schedule
For more information on the event locations and schedules click HERE
