Assessing your training needs
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Projects are essentially about managing change – and because change is an increasingly significant fact of business life - project management is an essential key skill in today’s working environment.

Many people are involved in project work, either directly or in a supporting role, and yet they have never received formal training in the basic techniques that can make the difference between a successful project and an expensive failure.

Organisations are now able to implement project management procedures and develop related skills in their personnel in order to improve project performance and thereby achieve critical business objectives.

What drives organisations to specifically invest in this level of training?

One driver is the presence of multiple new or inexperienced project managers, or part-time or occasional project managers, none of whom have fully developed PM abilities, BUT are responsible for critical project outcomes not only in the project department but also in all other key departments across the organisation. The result - schedule overruns, budget blowouts, resource shortages, conflict, stress and team burn out.

It is important for managers to understand their project staff’s level of skill and knowledge, and identify the area of training they wish to pursue, both from a project methodology and IT point of view.

Project Advantage has guidelines for setting up and carrying out training needs assessment. These guidelines can be used for many different types of training. For example, for designing training for your teams and/or new project managers on project management skills, specific technical or other subjects related to the “meat” of your projects, or “soft skills” such as communication.

Why: It is all too common to design training sessions that are essentially lecture courses, centered on the dissemination of as much information as possible about a topic. Yet the goal of training is to ensure the trainees come away with valuable information they need to do their jobs – not just to demonstrate how much the trainer knows by performing “info dumps.” In other words, the goal is to provide project staff not just skills or information they don’t already have, but skills or information they don’t already have and need in order to perform their required function.

A needs assessment will help determine what trainees already know, what they are comfortable with, possible areas of resistance or obstacles to learning, and the training areas most critical to their job function. Some of the things you uncover with an assessment will be obvious, but others may be things you never would have thought of until you reviewed the assessment results.