Have you assessed your company’s internal PMO capabilities lately? It’s an important exercise that can help you understand where your project team is strong and where there’s room for improvement. You may find you have knowledge or skills gaps based on your current needs, or an assessment might reveal competencies that will be necessary in the future.
These evaluations deliver important insight, but they can be surprisingly difficult to do using only your in-house resources. If you plan to conduct your own assessment of your internal project management capabilities, consider three factors that might sabotage your efforts.
Lack of neutral perspective
Team-level project management competency evaluations that are conducted in-house tend to encounter the same roadblocks that hamper similar work in other functional areas. Typical dilemmas include difficulty stepping back from the project group’s day-to-day limitations—which may encompass things like caps on staffing or budgets based on corporate-level directives—and separating these organizational constraints from the team’s internal challenges.
Office politics may also influence your in-house evaluation exercise. It’s not uncommon for project leaders to resist efforts to request resources such as funding for advanced training or additional headcount to fill known knowledge gaps, simply because they know from previous attempts that their requests probably won’t receive approval. Preconceived notions about how an assessment’s findings will be received by decision makers often prevent teams from conducting a truly candid evaluation of their capabilities.
Before starting your internal assessment, seek out a neutral, outside expert to help review your current state and provide an objective perspective to identify areas of improvement.
Insufficient internal knowledge
Some businesses don’t have a solid understanding of their project team members’ competency levels. For example, you may have an in-house professional who is highly skilled in a particular area, but they’ve never had an opportunity to apply those abilities due to the types of projects your firm typically executes. Certification levels or years of experience usually seem like suitable metrics to use in an assessment, but without strong internal knowledge about how those measures translate to real-world performance, you may not come away with the insights you need to drive improvement.
When the organization can’t build an accurate picture of the project group’s current capabilities, attempts to align the available skills with the business needs—either today or into the future—will ultimately be ineffective.
Consider partnering with an external project management expert for an objective assessment of your team’s skills. They can help you understand how to use benchmarking and other data to develop the capabilities you need most.
Limited visibility into support tools and systems
To understand your internal project management capabilities, you need to look beyond individual competencies. The right set of tools and technologies can greatly amplify your in-house skills and expertise. That includes the ability to conduct data analysis faster and with greater accuracy, receive and act on real-time notifications related to budget variances, streamline task resequencing and spot conflicts sooner, along with other capabilities.
Before you can count your technology assets as a capability, you first need to know what tools are available to you. Every internal assessment should include an inventory of the project management tools and systems the team uses (or could use, if they haven’t already adopted it).
Depending on your network environment, this inventory can be a complex and time-consuming undertaking. A relationship with an experienced project management consultancy gives you access to wider knowledge of the solutions marketplace to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your current technology stack. The right partner can also recommend tools to further optimize your project management efforts.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.