Self Assessment and the Value of Project Management Training: The Effect of Training on Assessment Inventory Scores (continued)
We are often asked who we would like to train within companies. We like to train Project Managers, Team Members, and Functional Managers in a group, since they depend on each other with different roles and responsibilities. In the case on this page, we trained different people from different departments all together. When we reviewed Assessment Inventory results of previous to later groups, we noticed remarkable improvement that had no apparent explanation. Upon asking the HR department of the background of attendees, we discovered that the “green” class included 4 functional managers. They were excited about the organizational change to the Project Management Method, and they carried that excitement back to their employees. All of the participants in the “blue” session reported directly to one or the other of those 4 line managers, who had begun requiring their employees to use the project management behaviors they had learned in class. For example, they began asking for task time estimates, work breakdown structures, and project execution plans. “What gets measured, gets done.”

This is an important object lesson. The effects of your project management behaviors and those you demand of your team members will ripple far beyond the immediate project. You are a project management change agent, for better or for worse.