What I look for when hiring full-time Project Managers

A common question I get asked by clients is what they should assess when staffing full-time PM positions.

Competency at project management requires both hard & soft skills, and “fit” is a difficult quality to judge – a star PM in one company’s culture is not necessarily a great PM for another.

Here are some of the attributes or techniques I recommend using to try to identify a good candidate:

1. “Scars on the back” – a good PM will have experienced failures, and should have learned something useful from them.  Distrust the PM who claims to “walk on water” – there are likely skeletons in that closet!

2. Self-awareness – To excel at the soft skills of PM, one needs to be self-aware.  This goes beyond the usual “what is your greatest strength or greatest weakness” to understanding how one will act in different circumstances.  A good way to assess this is through scenarios or role-play – the less prepared a candidate is for these, the more likely their true colors will emerge.  Assuming you know your corporate culture, design a scenario or role play that will be focused on assessing the candidates’ fit within your culture.  This can test everything from commitment to accountability, time management, reliance on formal vs. informal authority,  and openness of communication.

3. 360 degree references – The normal method of conducting references is to speak with a candidate’s past superiors or clients.  Extend this to include peers (other PMs or Resource Managers) and project team members.  This is one way to understand if the PM you are hiring is an “ends justify the means” bully.

4. If they have a PM certification (e.g. PMP), ask them when they received it and why they wanted to achieve it.  There is no right or wrong answer, but it’s a good way to see if their body language betrays them in the middle of a lie.

5. Current knowledge of PM trends & practices – PM is life-long learning so whether it is reading, attending conferences or participating in local PM association Chapter meetings, it is good to confirm that they don’t think they know it all.

6. Knowledge of your business – a good PM recognizes that completion of the project does not automatically mean that business value is realized.  An effective PM needs to know enough about your business including key clients, partners & competitors, market positioning and external influences.

7. Situational communication – Assess whether the PM is effective at tailoring communications to executives, peers and team members.  Again, a scenario or role play may be the best way to gauge this.

The risk of making a bad PM hiring decision can be grave – strategy is achieved through successful achievement of expected project benefits, and a bad PM could cost your company much more than just recruiting fees & fully loaded salary!

What’s the one role every PMO needs?

No, this is not a trick question!

The obvious choices that most practitioners will come up with are a PMO leader, a PM methodology consultant or a project manager.  While certainly valuable, none of these is as crucial as a good data report developer!

No two PMOs are the same as the PMI-funded research study by Drs. Hobbs & Aubry showed.  However, there are common trends & services that apply to the majority of PMOs and it is these commonalities that drive the need for effective report development.

Many PMOs struggle to justify their value.  While PMOs capture a lot of good information about projects & resources, if this information cannot be distilled into decision support data that can be presented in an effective fashion to executives, it is useless.  A good report developer can bridge the gap between the two solitudes of information overload and focused data.

PMOs integrate information from multiple processes & systems.  Time entry, PPM/PM information systems, resource skills databases and financial systems are just a few of the different business processes & tools that produce information that needs to be normalized, aggregated and reported.

A basic need that most PMOs are expected to fulfill is to communicate.  Effective communication is not just about having good content, but also about good structure and an effective medium.  Without a good report developer, it will be challenging to succeed on all fronts.

PMO leaders struggle to justify their staffing and budgets, but failing to invest in report development skills could be a good example of “penny-wise, pound-foolish”!

Organizational team culture – the Achilles Heel of concurrent project management?

I attended a thought provoking session at PMI’s 2010 Research & Education Conference that was delivered by Professor Peerasit Patanakul that covered factors necessary for project managers to successfully manage multiple concurrent projects (MPM as per Professor Patanakul).

The Professor’s research was done based on a single large financial organization focusing on their IT project portfolio.  However, the findings from the research align very closely with anecdotal evidence from past clients and industries I’ve worked with.

The top two factors (in order of priority out of a set of five in total) identified as contributing to effective MPM were:

• Teamwork oriented culture (organizationally)
• PM competency

The second factor is no surprise – good staff can overcome bad processes and tools to deliver expected results so long as they are pointed in the right direction and suitably motivated!

The first factor is less obvious, especially since it trumped other factors including consistent PM process & methodology, sufficient & sustainable resource allocation and consistent practices for selecting & assigning PMs to projects.

However, think about the challenge of managing multiple projects when you DON’T have a good teamwork oriented culture.  There will likely not be individual commitment to work products, reward for performance, open communication & team work.  If these attributes are not present, a PM spends a significant amount of time escalating resource performance issues, trying to motivate disengaged team members and chasing after “invisible” stakeholders and sponsors.  While this is aggravating on even a single project, a PM with sufficient experience and influence can still succeed.  However, when managing multiple concurrent projects, the PM does not have the luxury of time to focus on this and this will impact their overall effectiveness.

Understanding that the need for concurrent project management is not likely to go away anytime soon, organizations need to  ensure that they increase their PMs odds for success by fostering a suitable organizational teamwork oriented culture.  This could start by introducing resource evaluations tied to performance on projects, providing basic PM training for all project resources, and requiring commitment to accountability for all staff.