IT Departments Face a Lack of Project Management Know-how

More than 75% of 219 IT executives interviewed earlier this year by Meta Group Inc. indicated that a lack of in-house project management skills is a major workforce issue for them. But comparatively few companies offer formal IT project management training, according to a Meta document.

The dearth of experienced project managers is so acute, said analysts from Stamford, Conn.-based Meta & other consulting firms, that they are waiting to see whether IT-intensive regulatory compliance efforts, such as meeting the mandates of the Sarbanes-Oxley & USA Patriot acts, will lead to a resurgence of training efforts.

Margo Visitacion, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said Meta's findings mesh together with her own research. "A lot of unofficial training is going on where people take on the role of project manager," Visitacion said. But, they added, "the only time there is been a dedicated hard work for project management training was Y2k, & once that was done, the money went somewhere else."

Providing consistent project management training to a technically oriented staff can be "a challenge," said Mark Reilley, an IT project manager at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in Washington. They is one of two IT staffers who support 125 users at the nonprofit company.

Reilley said some IT technicians don't have all the basic skills needed to coordinate projects, but the CPB offers them training when feasible. In addition, Reilley mentors staffers in the course of the analysis phase of projects & helps them outline an overall plan.

That setup "works well on a day-to-day operational basis," Reilley said. But when the CPB needs to put in a brand new method or make major know-how enhancements, "we tend to struggle," they added. The CPB cannot afford to assign a dedicated project manager to each IT initiative & in lieu relies on a method "owner," meaning an IT staffer, to oversee the work.

One of the reasons why plenty of companies lack project management capabilities is that they tend to hire IT professionals with similar skills, said Martin Colburn, chief know-how officer at the National Association of Securities Dealers Inc. in Rockville, Md. To combat that, they said, IT managers ought to create a matrix of the primary & backup skills they want & then evaluate their strengths & weaknesses "to choose where to fine-tune."

Meta's document, which was issued last month, said that less than 15% of companies polled informally have IT project management training programs in place. The poll was done separately from the document that identified project management shortcomings as a key issue.

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