I have just come off the back of 3 weeks of non-stop project and supplier management training. A number of things have struck me as interesting and, sometimes frustrating about my experiences:

• With the odd exception, most companies I end up working with seem to believe that their project or supply management methods are “worst in class”
• In reality, if we were to take the best bits from how dispersed individuals are managing projects or suppliers we would end up with a perfectly adequate system
• Whilst it is easy to share and agree excellent processes in the classroom, delegates’ opportunities to implement new skills are limited at best

I guess these observations are nothing new. I can’t help wondering however if the solutions to these issues aren’t pretty straight forward and can in some ways be interrelated. Let’s take them in order.

Why is it that so many of the people I work with seem to believe that their systems and processes are quite so bad? Well, many of them have been in their company for some years and I think there is a great deal of internalisation going on. I have the benefit of seeing a multitude of approaches from multiple sectors and have yet to see one standardised cross-company system uniformly applied by all Project or Vendor Managers.

Their are two root causes I believe. Firstly, companies struggle to work horizontally. As soon as cooperation is required across functions (say from finance to I.T. to sales) even the most basic communications break down. Is it possible in your company that there are divergent objectives in the choice of suppliers or project business cases between different functions (e.g. cost versus quality?)

Secondly is the ultimate nemesis. We are all so “busy” that we don’t give up time for such luxuries as planning, understanding requirements, interrogating contracts, renegotiating metrics etc. We are doing our best just to keep 1/2 a step ahead of the sheer volume of work coming our way. Of course, much of this urgency is borne of an absence of planning, cross-functional thinking and solid communication! There is only one direction for this spiral..at some stage someone needs to be brave enough to point out the self-fulfilling madness

Taking the second of my observations – I strongly believe that the solution to most project or supply management problems already reside in the organisations I visit. Usually I am able to speak with managers from the business before I go in to deliver training. These meetings always bear fruit in terms of the tacit experience of the manager and often the physical evidence of their effective systems (plans, scorecards, contracts etc). Quite often these will be similar to “generics” covered in the training and often those who have proofed the training will not be aware that there are excellent (often times better) examples in offices all around them! Again I suppose this is reflecting the fragmented nature of modern businesses and the shortage of high quality developmental communication that is undertaken in the average day. Businesses need to learn better from themselves.

Lastly, an old bug-bear, why do so many firms insist on paying good money for training and then apparently making virtually no attempt to ensure that new skills get a chance to flourish? I am lucky enough to regularly re-visit many of my contracts and am frequently told that delegates have not had an opportunity to apply what was covered in the course. It seems that they have had enough time away from “real work” already in attending the course so they would be pushing their luck if they wanted to cause further disruption by daring to try and work in a different way!

So, what’s the answer to these endemic problems? I look at it with the passion of a trainer and the pragmatism of a project manager. When the passion gets in the way I end up frustrated, why can’t they just SEE how simple these issues are and the relative cost / benefit of addressing them in a meaningful way? But I know this won’t get anyone very far!

With a problem-solving head on I think we can achieve multiple objectives in one go, if we are smart at the outset. The best training I get involved with have a number of shared characteristics:

• A well-informed sponsor who stays central to the process. By well-informed they have a good view of what is going on across all functional silos in the business
• A pragmatic view on consultation. They understand consultation is important to get the training right but that it can also run out of control, confuse stakeholders, over-promise and lengthen the development timeline by weeks or months
• Open and honest communication – being as quick to identify their own flaws or knowledge gaps and not simply expecting the supplier to read minds (this displays a wider cultural trait that will encourage better horizontal communication)
• Use the training as advertising – get good practice from wherever it can be found in the business and underpin every module with an in-house example
• Use training to solve real issues – scenarios are nothing new and, genuinely, don’t need to take long to generate. Make sure the training has been designed to tackle real issues in the demonstration of how new tools and techniques can be applied (e.g. a recent delegate managed to cut 10 months of his project using critical path analysis in the class!)
• Don’t be afraid to use up course time in discussion – Socrates (or Protagoras depending on who you ask) knew this method to be an excellent means for adults to learn more about complex issues. I have found a stimulating debate followed by reflection and summary more rewarding on the whole than the most beautifully crafted Powerpoint deck
• Spend as much time and effort on the “befores” and “afters” – it’s oft quoted that 80% learning happens outside the classroom – use simple interventions, facilitated internally, to leverage this learning. The best outcomes I have seen have come from self-generating and policing learning groups (or communities of practice if you will). It should be part of the training design, long before a course runs, to prepare the ground for skills application post-course. There are of course a multitude of virtual / on-line applications that can allow this group-development to occur for widely dispersed groups. I suspect younger learners in your business will already be expecting to see these in action.

I’d love to hear about any creative solutions to these issues – or if you think I am way wide of the mark…