6 Benefits of Corporate Project Management Training for Teams
Employees are the biggest asset of any organization. But helping them perform to their best ability takes consideration and planning, as well as investment in the training and development they need. When you invest in your team members, the payoff is substantial because they are empowered to take action to help the company move towards its strategic goals. And the boost to employee motivation and retention is pretty good too!
One of the programs you can add to your roster of professional development for employees is corporate project management training. There are pros and cons of putting project management skills into your catalog - but a lot more advantages than disadvantages as you’ll see!
Advantages of Corporate Project Management Training
Let’s look at why you should consider investing in project management training courses as part of your management development activities. These are the main benefits of this kind of education:
Ready to take a look at how you could be getting these results for your own organization by upskilling your team with professional project management? Let’s go!
1. Confident approach to strategic change
Your company's strategic plan looks good on paper, but what will it take to deliver it? Projects! Projects are the way that change gets delivered, so the more confident your team is about using proven methods to effect that change, the more likely it is that you will be able to hit your strategic goals quickly and in a structured way.
Adding project management skills to your corporate education group programs will give your team a head start in being able to implement meaningful strategic change.
2. Consistent project results
Do you find that some of your projects go really well and others are a total nightmare? That’s probably because project team members are applying varying levels of skill to the job and coming out with inconsistent results.
Project management training will make sure that everyone has a common understanding of what is required to get the job done. You’ll be able to start delivering in a consistent, repeatable way, using structured techniques like risk analysis that allow projects to be compared against each other so you can learn from and replicate successes.
3. Improved resource utilization
A lot of managing projects is learning how to schedule work effectively and increase efficiency by making sure resources are used to their full potential without any periods of under-utilization.
That goes both ways too: proper project planning means you can avoid having some team members completely overloaded with work. Help your subject matter experts avoid burnout by making sure their work profile is optimized.
When resource utilization is managed efficiently, the right people are working on the right things, helping you get closer to your strategic goals more quickly. You’ll stop profit leakage by better managing billable hours. Good resource management techniques can also make the difference between your best people staying or printing out their resume in their lunch break.
While you could put leaders through a risk management program, a comprehensive project skills course would round out the corporate training solutions you can offer them and provide background and context to how to get work done more efficiently.
4. On-time project delivery
Meeting deadlines is a problem we hear about time and time again from corporate clients. It’s difficult to hit delivery dates when things are changing and the scope or requirements are not clear enough. When your project plan is going to look different next week, what’s the point of doing one at all?
A professional approach to project management will answer that question, and the answer is to take a step back and make sure you have confidence about what you are planning for. Many projects start to go wrong early in the project management lifecycle before any dates are missed. Poor project initiation and planning cause headaches later - headaches that could easily have been avoided with some good practice and professional techniques.
Training your team in project management skills is a sure-fire way to help more projects hit their delivery dates on time.
5. Improved leadership
The project manager’s role is necessarily one of a leader, because they are leading the change that the project will implement. Even if they don’t have a formal leadership role in the organization, or a leadership-related job title, they will still have to step up and lead. Often, that means taking ownership of the project and the tasks that need to be completed.
We hear from corporate leaders that empowering teams to lead and be accountable for the work is a constant challenge in many organizations. Sometimes employees have become so used to doing what is asked of them that thinking outside the box and being able to deliver using their own initiative is a challenge. Project management leadership training can help get the team back on track and using their own skills to effect change at all levels in the company. Plus, there’s a personal benefit too: leadership and project management skills can help individuals advance their careers.
6. Improved problem solving skills
Another key role for the project manager is solving problems. And yet many organizations don’t train managers in how to do that at all. Leaders are expected to work it out themselves, with no formal tools for problem solving or conflict resolution (because you can bet that when there’s a problem, there’s normally some kind of conflict around how best to resolve it).
That changes when your team is equipped with project management skills. Formal corporate project management training gives your colleagues the problem solving skills they need, along with tools and techniques that provide a head start addressing some of your trickier issues at work.
The project issue management process, for example, provides a structured way of assessing problems, dealing with them practically while taking the emotion out of the situation, and making sure that remedial work is done to address the issue. It also encourages the team to learn from that experience and put steps in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Suddenly problems don’t seem so tricky after all...
So are there any disadvantages of group study in project management skills? Not really, but to balance out the argument, we felt we should draw your attention to a couple of considerations.
Disadvantages of Corporate Project Management Training
Broadly speaking, we believe that any corporate training courses are worthwhile as we are committed to ongoing professional development. Admittedly, it has to be relevant to the job role, but project management is a transversal skill. From your most junior office administrator to your top-level executives, they will all be managing projects of one shape or size.
However, as with any professional development, there are a few considerations to take into account before you opt for adding new material into your corporate group study program. For creating a community of leaders who think like project managers, that includes:
Now, let’s take a look at how you can overcome those challenges.
1. Cost
There is obviously a cost in professional, proven training delivered by a company with an exemplary track record and experienced trainers. You’ll need to factor in the investment so that your company can plan for and schedule the expense.
We think it is worth the cost because you’ll get your investment back many times over in on time delivery, organizational success and better project results, but there is still that initial outlay to take into account. Put it in the budget and ring fence the expense. You can track benefits and return on investment with measures you select to show the value of your investment.
In addition, the cost of PMP certification training courses is a lot less than recruiting and onboarding a new hire.
2. Training time
It takes time to build skills, and that means people have to be away from their day jobs. It can be hard to find time for people to attend corporate training.
Some companies may prefer to put half the team through the training at a time, so the others can focus on keeping the department on track while their colleagues are focused on learning. Then the team can switch round.
However, a smarter way to overcome this obstacle is to use self-paced online learning for corporate teams. This is the way we deliver much of our corporate training as it really helps organizations manage the time commitment for their employees and schedule learning flexibly around the needs of their roles.
3. Risk of staff leaving
Finally, there is always the chance that a member of staff will develop their skills at your company and then use those new abilities to land a different job. We would hope that students completing their project management courses would be supported in the workplace and have the opportunity to put their new skills into practice. That’s an easy way to show them that they are valued and that their career is growing at your company.
At the end of the day you can’t stop people leaving, but you can show them all the reasons why it is worth staying with your business and investing in their career with you. Providing them with opportunities for professional development and career progression is a simple way to encourage them to stay.
Project Management Training for Improved Results
Are you ready to add corporate project management training to your professional development offering for your employees? Our self-paced, online courses are the perfect way to add on-demand education to your course catalog. Either make the learning materials available to specific employees or let your colleagues self-select and recommend themselves for this opportunity.
Corporate project management training can really make a difference to your company’s results and your team’s ability to deliver their work in an effective way. Get in touch to find out more about how we can help your business build its delivery capability by improving the project management maturity levels across the company.
