The Soft Side of Practicing Hard Skills

May 14, 2009 | by

Debbie's comment regarding improved employee morale being an ancillary benefit of project management brings to mind a discussion I had with a client CIO last year who had been wondering about measuring the benefits of the project management and portfolio management methodologies he had introduced into his organization. Naturally he was thinking about “hard numbers” such as projects completed on time and in budget.

This CIO had not yet thought about measuring the human benefits he was achieving: the sense of satisfaction the staff would receive from knowing they were working on projects that were important to the company, the sense of accomplishment associated with achievement of commitments they had made, the feeling of belonging to a team with a common objective. As someone who had been doing project-based work for the past 30 years, I knew that working with a good PM, reasonably applying PMBOK® Guide-aligned processes, was a much more positive experience than working with a “shoot from the hip” PM.

When I shared my experiences with this CIO and we discussed measuring these indirect benefits, he realized that yes, perhaps there was something there to be surveyed and considered. And, no surprise, the results of his HR survey were aligned with Jeannette’s comments (in her post Agility Happens!) regarding employee satisfaction improvements.

Project management, when practiced right (just enough project management process, as indicated by the risk profile of the project) definitely has a positive impact on employee morale and turnover rates.