Project Management Professional certification

Ed Shehab, manager, professional services, CMCS

By Ed Shehab

As the number of projects in the Middle East, and especially in the Gulf region, swells up year after year and as more money is invested into the area, many of today’s engineers are being placed in very stressful and challenging roles to manage projects of seismic proportions. Most of these professionals are typically engineers from varied disciplines such as civil, mechanical and IT who have no previous or formal project management training.

Misconception
The perception is that highly-skilled engineers should be able to easily manage a project in their respective field. This is a huge and dangerous misconception, and miscalculations about an engineer’s abilities could have detrimental and costly consequences. The project management world refers to this scenario as the “halo effect”. Just because an engineer is technically capable does not automatically mean that he or she is capable of managing projects as well. Conversely, just because an engineer is not technically capable does not mean that the person is incapable of efficiently managing projects.

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What It Takes
Project management is a discipline on its own and involves quite a good deal of training and practice to develop. There are far too many components to managing projects beyond knowing the technical aspects of the field in which the project operates. As a matter of fact, technical subject expertise hardly plays any role in the success of project delivery. Per a survey done in 2001 by KPMG, “of 256 companies, only 14 percent of all failures can be chalked up to a company’s inability to cope with technology. The other 86 percent owe to some common management woes: improperly defined objectives (17 percent), unfamiliar scope (17 percent), lack of effective communication (20 percent) and poor project management skills (32 percent)”.

This survey speaks volumes in favour of developing a proper project management culture within every organisation seeking to minimise failure. Here is where PMI comes in; PMI is a not-for-profit professional association whose “primary goal is to advance the practice, science and profession of project management throughout the world in a conscientious and proactive manner so that organizations everywhere will embrace, value and utilize project management-and then attribute their successes to it”.

PMI was founded in 1969 by working project managers. It currently comprises 400,000 members and credential holders, with a 10-15 per cent annual membership growth. Among its associates, about 250,000 are certified as Project Management Professionals (PMP) and hold globally recognized PMP credentials. Of the total number of PMPs worldwide, 10 per cent come from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The figure is steadily growing as more and more organisations seek to standardise and globalise their project management procedures.

As a matter of fact, “a shortage of 6 million skilled project professionals is expected by 2013. Add to that the fact that, of the 20 million people participating in projects worldwide, just one million [or 5 per cent] have professionally recognized formal training on how to best execute those projects. One thing becomes clear: The demand for skilled project managers is at a critically urgent level.”