Episode 21 – PMI Standards and Role Delineation Study

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● ERIC NORMAN NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our chance to meet with you and talk about the nuts and bolts of project management and what matters most to you as a professional project manager, whether it’s getting certified or simply doing the job of project management.  We hear from some of the leaders in the industry and draw on their experience.  I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And talk about experts, Andy, we certainly have one with us in the studio today. ANDY CROWE:  This is an exciting podcast for me, Nick, and I’m not sure I’ve ever looked forward to one more than this.  So this is a real treat. NICK WALKER:  Wow.  That is saying a lot.  Eric Norman has consulted and led projects and business process improvement efforts at AT&T, at Sprint, Delta Airlines, Cox Communications, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just to name a few.  He’s a frequent presenter at national and international trade conferences and is a recognized authority on program management practice.  Eric, welcome to Manage This. ERIC NORMAN:  Thank you, Nick.  Thank you, Bill and Andy.  I’m thrilled to be here. NICK WALKER:  Eric, you sort of have a unique role in all of this.  A lot of your work has been in the area of developing standards for the industry, but also in performance of a particular role.  Given your extensive background, give us a little brief overview of your current role in project management. ERIC NORMAN:  I actually have two roles.  One is an employment-type role; the other is volunteer.  So from an employment perspective, when I’m working with clients and working with leaders, I’m focused on alignment of strategy in the organization with the delivery of the initiatives that they have.  On the volunteer side, I’ve had a lot of experience with standards, as you mentioned. But most recently I’m working on the Certification Governance Council.  The Governance Council is a subcommittee of PMI’s Board of Directors, and it oversees the strategy and governance of PMI certifications, the eight certifications.  So we look historically at what has happened with the development of certifications over the course of PMI’s history.  And we look out into the future five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years; and we talk about how to manage what we have currently as a family of certifications, and what does the marketplace demand coming forward.  And that’s a fairly active interaction between PMI’s Global Operations Center, the staff, CEO and all the vice presidents and staff at PMI, but also the Board of Directors who oversee that staff. So it’s a very active and interesting role; and I get to see the relationship between certifications, the performance of the role, and the standards that kind of guide that performance. ANDY CROWE:  Eric, just to clarify, earlier you used the word “performance.”  So you’re not looking at the performance of the certification, you’re looking at the performance of the role?  Is that correct? ERIC NORMAN:  We actually are looking – both. ANDY CROWE:  So what does that mean?  What does the performance of the certification mean from your standpoint?  What do you track? ERIC NORMAN:  PMI – you could think of the certifications for PMI as products.  PMI has three major components of their product set.  They have knowledgeware, which are standards and things of that nature. ANDY CROWE:  The PMBOK Guide... ERIC NORMAN:  PMBOK Guide. ANDY CROWE:  ...being a prime example flagship. ERIC NORMAN:  Absolutely.  And it is the flagship.  The other standards, the practice standards and the guides – so the knowledgeware and the publications that PMI is also involved in.  The second big component is membership. BILL YATES:  Right. ERIC NORMAN:  So there is a large effort to always manage the members and their experience and those things.  And the performance of how the revenue and just like another product... ANDY CROWE:  An adoption, sure. ERIC NORMAN:  ...of the ideas behind project management are working throughout the world.  The third are certifications.  The certifications that PMI issues and maintains are roughly, well, they’re a major component of PMI’s revenue stream.  So we look at the performance of each of the credentials as individuals, but also as a group. ANDY CROWE:  Okay. ERIC NORMAN:  So that’s at the macro level.  We also look at how the standards and the credentials match the actual performance of the work... BILL YATES:  Okay. ERIC NORMAN:  ...people actually do. BILL YATES:  Right. ERIC NORMAN:  So when there’s a question about how a particular role is evolving, the Certification Governance Council gets involved in that and starts to work with the staff and the board about where is the standard and where is the actual performance of the role going. ANDY CROWE:  It would almost be a relevance factor, how relevant is the credential that we’re issuing to the work actually being done, how do those two match. ERIC NORMAN:  Exactly.  And are there some that aren’t relevant, or maybe are there some that there’s a major demand in the marketplace that PMI doesn’t have an offering. BILL YATES:  Right, right.  The VA, for instance. ERIC NORMAN:  Right.  That didn’t come by accident. BILL YATES:  Yeah, right.  And Eric, the other – I’m thinking about the role that you see and that you’ve played in delineating where does project management stop and where does program management begin?  You know, that’s... NICK WALKER:  That’s a great question. BILL YATES:  That’s a difficult – so it sounds as if that’s part of the call, as well, is to help guide and define what is a project manager, what is a program manager, what is a portfolio manager. ERIC NORMAN:  That is true.  We get involved in the business case and the definition of the role that’s behind the various credentials that PMI maintains.  But to answer your question, Bill, it’s an interesting thing that more and more people are coming to realize that project management doesn’t stop where program management begins.  These two roles are parallel and partnered.  And they represent different functions within an organization, but critically important functions.  And they are really needed to be working together.  It’s a rewarding career to follow project management to its ultimate end and have a very – I’ve seen projects that make other programs seem small. BILL YATES:  Right. ERIC NORMAN:  And I’ve seen programs that make projects seem small.  So the idea is that there’s no one style that is you work on project management for so long in your career, and then you stop doing that and become a program manager someday.  That’s really not the way it works.  There are many people who come to program management straight from a finance background. BILL YATES:  Right. ERIC NORMAN:  Or from a military officer candidacy school background.  And they’ve been running programs in government for 10 years, and suddenly they’re a program manager. ANDY CROWE:  And the skill sets, you know, they’re Venn diagrams.  They overlap. ERIC NORMAN:  They overlap. ANDY CROWE:  But they’re not identical. ERIC NORMAN:  They are not identical.  And I think people are starting to realize that there’s extreme value in both.  There are program managers who just do not understand how to do projects well.  But they need with them people who can do operational things and do tactical precise things extremely well.  And by the same token, project managers really need to understand how what they’re doing fits into a larger picture.  So it’s the program manager and portfolio manager’s business connection at the leadership level that helps draw everything together and makes it work as one. ANDY CROWE:  You know, just a thought along that.  If you spend any time around me – and that’s not always a good thing.  But if you spend time around me, I’ve started seeing the world in this two-factor sense.  And the two-factor sense, there’s a couple of ways to look at it.  But the way that I talk about it is, yes, project managers need this intense ability to focus, and focus and work on their project, and prioritize and those types of things.  They also need to ability to zoom out and look at the big picture, talk about benefits realization, figure out how this fits into the context for their organization and operations.  You know, projects don’t include operations, but yet we’ve got to be aware of them, or else we’ll get in a lot of trouble. ERIC NORMAN:  That’s critical. ANDY CROWE:  And so Fiedler did all this work back in the ’60s in contingency theory.  And basically I’m butchering his theory kind of intentionally for my own purposes here.  But Fiedler said, look, what made you successful over here, your success is contingent upon your ability to switch skill sets, to activate different skill sets.  And whether that be task-oriented and relationship-oriented, whether it be something else, you need to be able to make those transitions.  And you’re exactly right.  There are times when the project manager needs to close the door, hunker down, focus, prioritize, and knock all this out.  There are times when absolutely it takes just almost a 180-degree different skill set. ERIC NORMAN:  And you rarely find – and Andy, I think that’s really a wonderful point.  You rarely find all those skill sets in a single individual. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  But don’t you find that, as you get older, you get better at doing these things? ERIC NORMAN:  No. ANDY CROWE:  Okay. ERIC NORMAN:  I don’t.  I think you get better at some things. ANDY CROWE:  Right, right. ERIC NORMAN:  But not all. ANDY CROWE:  Correct. ERIC NORMAN:  And I think it would serve us well if we became comfortable with the fact that we can’t do everything, and start to refine the things that we do well,