Project Management Best Practices, 5th Edition

8Training and Education

8.0 INTRODUCTION

Establishing project management training programs is one of the greatest challenges facing training directors because project management involves numerous complex and interrelated skills (qualitative/behavioral, organizational, and quantitative). In the early days of project management, project managers learned more from their own mistakes than from the experience of others. Today, companies that excel at project management are offering a corporate curriculum in project management. Effective training supports project management as a profession.

Some large corporations offer more internal courses related to project management than do most colleges and universities. Such companies treat education almost as a religion. Smaller companies have more modest internal training programs and usually send their people to publicly offered training programs.

This chapter discusses processes for identifying the need for training, selecting the students who need training, designing, and conducting the training, and measuring training's return on dollars invested.

8.1 TRAINING FOR MODERN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

During the early days of project management, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, training courses concentrated on the advantages and disadvantages of various organizational forms (e.g., matrix, traditional, projectized, and functional). Executives learned quickly, however, that any organizational structure could be made to work effectively ...