THE BENEFITS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT TRAINING

Now that we’ve laid out the ground-rules, it’s a lot easier to visualize what some of the benefits of project management are. I’ve put together my own top-ten list of the benefits of project management. Your personal mileage with these benefits may vary:

1. Better Efficiency in Delivering Services: Project management provides a “roadmap” that is easily followed and leads to project completion. Once you know where to avoid the bumps and pots holes it stands to reason that you’re going to be working smarter and not harder and longer.
2. Improved / Increased / Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Whenever you get a project done on time and under budget, the client walks away happy. And a happy client is one you’ll see again. Smart project management provides the tools that enable this client/manager relationship to continue.
3. Enhanced Effectiveness in Delivering Services: The same strategies that allowed you to successfully complete one project will serve you many times over.
4. Improved Growth and Development Within your Team: Positive results not only command respect but more often than not inspire your team to continue to look for ways to perform more efficiently.
5. Greater Standing and Competitive Edge: This is not only a good benefit of project management within the workplace but outside of it as well; word travels fast and there is nothing like superior performance to secure your place in the marketplace.
6. Opportunities to Expand your Services: A by-product of greater standing. Great performance leads to more opportunities to succeed.
7. Better Flexibility: Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of project management is that it allows for flexibility. Sure project management allows you to map out the strategy you want to take see your project completed. But the beauty of such organization is that if you discover a smarter direction to take, you can take it. For many small-to-midsize companies, this alone is worth the price of admission.
8. Increased Risk Assessment: When all the players are lined up and your strategy is in place potential risks will jump out and slap you in the face. And that’s the way it should be. Project management provides a red flag at the right time: before you start working on project completion.
9. Increase in Quality: Goes hand-in-hand with enhanced effectiveness
10. Increase in Quantity: I saved the best for last> And increase in quality is often the result of better efficiency, a simple reminder regarding the benefits of project management.

By implementing fundamental project management strategies, you will narrow your focus, reach desired goals and achieve those goals within specific time and cost perimeters. The final result is that everyone comes out a winner - which just may be Project Management's best benefit of all.

Project Management is all about the effective management of change and can benefit an organisation in many ways because it provides a systematic approach to managing and controlling different types of projects and different types of change.


Professional project management training can ensure that organisations of all sizes reap the benefits of a well-controlled, project-based approach to business. Some of these benefits are listed below:

• Develop a full understanding of the project goals, objectives and benefits before committing significant resources.This ensures that only the projects which are expected to provide benefits exceeding the investment of time and money are initiated.
• Ensure that the project proceeds effectively through all the essential phases, from concept through to completion.This makes sure the project is properly reviewed by the stakeholders at key stages including initiation and final acceptance.
• Provide a rigorous approach to defining a realistic, but still challenging, timescale and budget for completion of the project.
• Establish a structured approach for clearly defining roles and responsibilities for the delivery of the project and its work packages.This is critical to building commitment to the project objectives.
• Implement a systematic process to manage changes to the project scope or objectives.This minimises the risks associated with change to the end-product or to the benefits for the sponsors.

What People Say About Training Courses

A survey of past delegates who have attended Parallel Project Management Training Courses has provided further insight into the benefits of training in terms of acquiring new skills, developing existing skills and gaining practical advice to implement in the day-to-day work environment. 

When questioned, almost 90% of course attendees believed that their organisation had benefited from their attending the course. Specific benefits mentioned by delegates are

1. Having a common language to describe issues within a business and has helped allow clearer definitions of areas for development versus best practice.
2. Using people to successfully deliver projects
3. With everyone following APMP it is helping bring a consistent baseline knowledge base to the business.

Improving communication between stakeholders and improved awareness and implementation of Leadership skills / qualities. 

Benefits in the Everyday Work EnvironmentFormal training was seen to be particularly useful for improving communication between stakeholders and developing a better awareness of the leadership qualities required in a project manager. In meetings and when discussing project management tools and techniques a formal training course helped those involved to better understand what was being discussed and to ensure everyone was working from a consistent knowledge base. Training also helped when it came to putting together and managing the project team and dealing with the different characteristics of project teams; many delegates viewed the professional qualifications obtained as a necessary part of progressing up the career ladder by equipping PMs with a thorough understanding of the essential attributes of a successful project.

Where courses were undertaken by a group from the same organisation the common learning of a standard method such as APMP helped in developing a consistent approach to managing projects using a common language. This common language to describe issues within a business enabled clearer definitions of areas for development versus best practice.

On a practical level the courses provided real-life scenarios to hone skills with software tools and equip delegates to truly take advantage of features such as Pert Charts and Critical Paths. Courses offered powerful insights into establishing stakeholder requirements and how to satisfy them by spending more time with key stakeholders and focusing on the Critical Success Factors for project managers.

Developing Existing Skills

Where respondents to the survey, who participated in a range of APM courses, PRINCE2 Practitioner and PMP Certification courses, felt that the course had also been beneficial in developing their existing project management skills the areas in which they felt they had gained most included:

• Dealing with Change
• People Management
• Stakeholder Management and Engagement
• Communication with Stakeholders
• Communication with Project Teams
• Planning
• Leadership
• Developing Critical Success Factors
• Managing Conflict

Managing Quality

Learning New Skills

Clearly every delegate would also expect to learn new skills on a training course as well as reinforcing existing skills and being able to take a fresh perspective on what they already know.

Typical new skills learnt included:

• Active risk management
• Planning, implementing and monitoring projects
• Pert Charts
• Costing
• Detailed knowledge of scheduling
• The Procurement process
• Earned Value Management

The survey of past course attendees further revealed that many delegates gained a clearer understanding of PM terminology with which they were already familiar. The courses reinforced their understanding and ability to use a common language to discuss project management subjects. This enabled them to better capture and communicate project requirements and success criteria, and to obtain concise consensus on what would constitute a successful project from the perspective of the stakeholders, project manager and customers.

But for many, one of the major benefits of the training course was formalising the topics that they already understood; putting these topics 

Project Management Training Benefits at A Glance

Improved Efficiency
Enabling a project manager to accurately determine the requirements of a project and to assess the available resources and make best use of those resources. This ensures the scope, schedule and budget are accurately set from the start.

Enhanced Confidence
Learning about how to identify risks in projects, and how to manage, them helps build a project manager's confidence and ability to manage projects effectively.

Consistent Delivery
Confident, efficient project managers who are able to deal effectively with risks will consistently and reliably deliver successful projects avoiding wasted time, effort and money.

Customer Satisfaction
When the tools and techniques are used to deliver projects reliably; deliver what was required and within budget then the customer will be satisfied.

A Fresh Perspective
Experienced project managers can improve their PM knowledge with new techniques but can also simply learn to approach a familiar scenario with a new perspective.

Behavioural Changes
Project Management is not just about experience, tools and techniques but also learning how to influence others and resolve conflict.

BY PAUL NAYBOUR
Paul Naybour is the Business Development Director of Parallel Project Training. He has been a project management consultant for 9 years and has experience managing project management development programmes for many clients, both small and large. Paul's Google Profile

Steevyee: Chimamanda Adichie writes on the kind of President...

Steevyee: Chimamanda Adichie writes on the kind of President...: Award winning author Chimamanda Adichie writes on the kind of President she wants. Read below.. Some of my relatives lived for decades in...

Chimamanda Adichie writes on the kind of President she wants.

Award winning author Chimamanda Adichie writes on the kind of President she wants. Read below..

Some of my relatives lived for decades in the North, in Kano and Bornu. They spoke fluent Hausa. (One relative taught me, at the age of eight, to count in Hausa.) They made planned visits to Anambra only a few times a year, at Christmas and to attend weddings and funerals. But sometimes, in the wake of violence, they made unplanned visits. I remember the word ‘Maitatsine’ – to my young ears, it had a striking lyricism – and I remember the influx of relatives who had packed a few bags and fled the killings. What struck me about those hasty returns to the East was that my relatives always went back to the North. Until two years ago when my uncle packed up his life of thirty years in Maiduguri and moved to Awka. He was not going back. This time, he felt, was different.

My uncle’s return illustrates a feeling shared by many Nigerians about Boko Haram: a lack of hope, a lack of confidence in our leadership. We are experiencing what is, apart from the Biafran war, the most violent period in our nation’s existence. Like many Nigerians, I am distressed about the students murdered in their school, about the people whose bodies were spattered in Nyanya, about the girls abducted in Chibok. I am furious that politicians are politicizing what should be a collective Nigerian mourning, a shared Nigerian sadness.

And I find our president’s actions and non-actions unbelievably surreal.

I do not want a president who, weeks after girls are abducted from a school and days after brave Nigerians have taken to the streets to protest the abductions, merely announces a fact-finding committee to find the girls.

I want President Jonathan to be consumed, utterly consumed, by the state of insecurity in Nigeria. I want him to make security a priority, and make it seem like a priority. I want a president consumed by the urgency of now, who rejects the false idea of keeping up appearances while the country is mired in terror and uncertainty. I want President Jonathan to know – and let Nigerians know that he knows – that we are not made safer by soldiers checking the boots of cars, that to shut down Abuja in order to hold a World Economic Forum is proof of just how deeply insecure the country is. We have a big problem, and I want the president to act as if we do. I want the president to slice through the muddle of bureaucracy, the morass of ‘how things are done,’ because Boko Haram is unusual and the response to it cannot be business as usual.

I want President Jonathan to communicate with the Nigerian people, to realize that leadership has a strong psychological component: in the face of silence or incoherence, people lose faith. I want him to humanize the lost and the missing, to insist that their individual stories be told, to show that every Nigerian life is precious in the eyes of the Nigerian state.

I want the president to seek new ideas, to act, make decisions, publish the security budget spending, offer incentives, sack people. I want the president to be angrily heartbroken about the murder of so many, to lie sleepless in bed thinking of yet what else can be done, to support and equip the armed forces and the police, but also to insist on humaneness in the midst of terror. I want the president to be equally enraged by soldiers who commit murder, by policemen who beat bomb survivors and mourners. I want the president to stop issuing limp, belated announcements through public officials, to insist on a televised apology from whoever is responsible for lying to Nigerians about the girls having been rescued.

I want President Jonathan to ignore his opponents, to remember that it is the nature of politics, to refuse to respond with defensiveness or guardedness, and to remember that Nigerians are understandably cynical about their government.

I want President Jonathan to seek glory and a place in history, instead of longevity in office. I want him to put aside the forthcoming 2015 elections, and focus today on being the kind of leader Nigeria has never had.

I do not care where the president of Nigeria comes from. Even those Nigerians who focus on ‘where the president is from’ will be won over if they are confronted with good leadership that makes all Nigerians feel included. I have always wanted, as my president, a man or a woman who is intelligent and honest and bold, who is surrounded by truth-telling, competent advisers, whose policies are people-centered, and who wants to lead, who wants to be president, but does not need to – or have to- be president at all costs.

President Jonathan may not fit that bill, but he can approximate it: by being the leader Nigerians desperately need now.

By Chimamanda Adichie