Team learning fosters project success

It is common practice in most companies dealing with projects, to improve the project manager’s skills in trainings and seminars. This leads not only to project managers with very different training experiences, vocabulary and documentation standards. It also ignores the fact, that a project team not only consists of project managers, but of business analysts and maybe contract managers and that the project team can only perform as good as its weakest member.

The solution to this problem is obvious: Take all members of the project responsibility life cycle and train them together in an integrated seminar program. All members benefit from that approach by realizing how they fit in the bigger picture of a project and what challenges and issues arise for other team members. The team will turn away from silo thinking and team efforts become more and more aligned.

The Los Angeles Department of Mental Health (DMH) recognized the above mentioned weaknesses in recent training approaches and built up a new plan for integrated team trainings. Motivation for their research was that a new Mental Health Services Act increased their project workload by 30%, while still being understaffed. Therefore, the DMH mandated ESI International, to work out a training plan that enables them to execute a series of projects more effectively.

ESI International created a training roadmap that combined business analysis training with teaching of standard project management knowledge for entire project teams. Every class was finished with an exam, so that class participance could be ensured. As additional motivation, a formal certificate was handed over for finishing all classes of the training project. Besides that, non-IT people were taught in IT project management, to give them an insight into the other perspective.

In fact, all employees who finished the program were more effective afterwards. This was proven by conducting a big project for countywide integration of medical health information. Despite the understaffing, the project stayed on time and on budget, which is not common for projects at all. In addition, the county CIO office took DMH’s approach into consideration when planning a formal training for all governmental IT project teams. They combined the best aspects of all approaches to a final training plan.

Teamwork training fosters reliance on each other, as well as confidence and morale in the team. Even the manuals from classes serve as reference for issues in everyday business.

It is obviously a huge improvement in team outcome, to use this method of team training. Nevertheless, some specific topics for project managers cannot be covered in team classes. Project human resources trainings for example have to be offered only to employees who have personnel responsibility. Contractors are hard to fit into company internal team trainings and business analysts might need more basic trainings than project managers.

Sources:

Damaré, Bill. "Workplace learning to improve IT project management". Public Manager, Winter2008, Vol. 37 Issue 4, p45-50.
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