What Makes a Project Manager; The uses and abuses of a Project
Management Competency framework in practice?
Introduction
This paper is written from the point of view of a Practitioner of Project Management, responsible for the Project Management Function within a transnational organisation. The work that is described here was undertaken to create a Project Management functional identity, define the roles within the function and try to create a unified approach to the subject, a training baseline and career progression guidelines We were operating transnationally and initially had a real problem in the identification of who was involved, what they did and why Project Management could be important to the Company. On the United Kingdom side, we had already made some attempt to recognise that we were a Project Company and that effective Project Management (PM) was a critical competency - but what was it? It was apparent that our European counterparts also operated within a Project Structure but this had not been formally identified nor given any particular recognition and the route to becoming a Project Manager was governed by chance and also by age. In the UK we had determined that we needed to recruit young people and test the idea of training them to become Project Managers and so there was a prime motivation for us to use this exercise as an attempt to define a Career Path for our youngsters.