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Jan
12
In my experience, some of the worst project managers I have ever met were certified as project managers by some institution. I have fired many certified PM’s for failure to deliver. The four most outstanding project managers that I have ever worked with have no certifications. I have seen no evidence that certification predicts superior performance.
When I am in search of a project manager to hire, I ignore certification in project management when I see it on a resume.
Great project manager abilities:
- Writing status reports – especially executive status
- Over-communication of project events
- Driving project teams to complete activities on time
- Innovative, relentless issue resolution
Project management training apparently consists of learning the phases of a project, how to use Microsoft Project, and how to schedule and budget various tasks. Most PM’s think they are hired to ask everyone for their status, attach documents to a weekly email, and sit on continuous conference calls. I’m sorry, but a monkey can do that.
What a monkey cannot do is create a visual status that will fit on one slide of the health of the project and put that into the body of an email and broadcast it out to those who might be concerned. A monkey cannot summarize the purpose of a project in one sentence and yet catch it all. A monkey does not know how to leverage meetings, escalations, or project jeopardy reports to management to get people moving. A monkey cannot get an issue resolved almost immediately.
Most of what certification programs think is valuable is practically worthless. What is truly valuable – they do not teach. Project managers are better off learning how to be aggressive over-communicators who know how to boil down all information to concise, easy-to-eat tidbits than they are sticking acronyms after their names.
When the really great project managers see a certification listed after someone’s signature in email as if they were an MD or PhD, they chuckle to themselves. Putting that there is like hanging up a sign that says, “I am not experienced enough to be aware that this certification does not predict performance.”
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5 Responses to “Project Management Certification Does Not Predict Performance”
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About the Author
Rob Redmond studied sociology, psychology, and political science as an undergraduate before entering the workforce. Returning to school, Redmond earned an MBA from Georgia State University in June of 2000. Rob is currently employed as a manager of IT of a large technology company.
Rob is 41 years old and is married to Lorna. Together they have two sons. The family includes a dog named Decibel (Deci the DooDoo Dog), and a black and white cat named Keiko.
Rob,
This is right on target and was a pleasure to read. It’s all about communication, sufficient planning and adapting in the face of reality.
Roger
I have only seen PMI certification as being useful in a PMO organizations. I have to agree that the front-line PM work lives and dies by communication and judgement.
I have had many people on our PRACTICAL project management courses who say this course is much more useful than certificated programmes (PRINCE2) they have been on.
A key issue for me is that people who attend training can put into practice what they have gained from any course. On our practical courses they can and feedback says they do.
Interestingly, we had a project manager with no qualifications who project managed a major school e-build here in the UK. She was so good that she was taken on by the government department who were running the whole programme.
I wouldn’t go that far – I think during different PM courses you can learn basics which become useful during every-day work. Of course that’s not the only place where you can learn them and if you have a good mentor at your company you should be able to learn them more effectively.
I definitely agree that any title, PMP included, doesn’t guarantee you get a good PM. Lack of title doesn’t do it either. Personally I share your approach – I don’t care which titles someone has, although quite often they’re good indicators a candidate think about project management seriously (even if he doesn’t qualify).
The PMP is like any other toolbox (MBA, BS, PhD)… you get a set of tools, and it requires judgement to know when to use each one. You don’t use a hammer to tighten a bolt.
I agree about the communication, but I think there is another element needed in good PMs – perserverence. They’ve got to be willing to stick with a message, over and over again, repeating status dozens of times, and staying on top of things until it is done, without getting worn out or flustered. The best stay at it, close it, and move on without burning themselves or others along the way.