Project Management Certification Is Not A Performance Measure

I agree wholheartedly. If anything PM certs confuse the bearer into thinking they know “the” way to manage a project. Personality and a drive to communicate well are far more important.

Rick Cogley
Tokyo

While I agree that PM certs can be misleading, you cannot just ignore a lengthy list of credentials on someones resumé. With enough training, even a monkey can learn how to communicate.

Eoin Redmond
Ireland.

Hi Rob. You’ve hit the nail on the head. All of the project management teachings in the world do not substitute for the ability to communicate to both the end customer or the project team in a manner that allows everyone to understand exactly what is going on at any point in time.

MS project takes WAY too much time out of anyone’s day and actually delivers no more capability than writing a to-do list (I exaggerate, but only slightly). Complex project status reporting in multiple output forms, while possible useful for the PM, do not necessarily serve the purpose of delivering the “one sentence to tell us where we are” .

If you take your list of “what makes a great PM”, every one of them is centred around the ability to effectively communicate to the project audience.

Nice post - regards

Certifcation does not result in superior performance. And I agree with that view.

However, I do not agree that someone claiming to be MD, PhD or MBBS degree is a monkey as he does not how to deliver. They have something. You just can not write it off. Just answer these:

1. Will you go to a person who says -

I do not have a MBBS degree, but I know how to deliver and I have read many books on how to be a doctor. Or will you first prefer someone with a doctor degree?

2. Will you recruit an engineer who says -

I am not an engineer, but I have read hundreds of books, and have worked with some projects.

And they may be good. The best names in industry of high tech do not have a degree - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg etc. But they are exceptionally talented.

And you like it or not, they too recruit people from best of universities such as Stanford or Havard or LBS. I’ll not say someone with a degree from them or certification which is demanding like PMP/Price2, Sun Architect Programs are monkeys!

As far as I know people who say engineering degree or a medical degree or an MBA from Stanford/Instead is meaningless - reason is they could not do it, however hard they might have tried.

Satya,

There is a big difference between being certified in a science, such as medicine, and licensed by a board of experts in a field where lives are on the line… and project management, which is an art, and which varies widely from one organization to the other as to how it is performed.

I have hired and fired quite a few PM’s in my career. My top performers have no certifications. The people I have fired all universally were certified.

Yes, I can just write off that certification. I believe that it is not certifying the right things.

-Rob

Strange Rob. Your conclusion is wrong. You really think a PM certification is a performance measure. A bad performance measure! Please review the title of your post.
Eliseo Pita, PMP

Few things to ponder:
1. How do you rate yourselves as a manager?
2. Do you think “Rob certified” PMs are going to do better in “non-Rob” environment?
3. What have you done to improve the quality of certification?
4. Can you build a framework and let us all have a copy to create your desired PM competancy?

Thanks,

Summary: If you want certification to match field performance, you will need to develop a performance (or competency) based certification. It’s not enough to pass a test!

Details: I have a fairly extensive background in HPT (Human Performance Technology… yep there’s a whole association w/thousands of people devoted to it!) and instructional design. Key to the field is the identification and mapping of competencies, skills, etc. in order to develop training, practice activities, measurement of skills attained, and so on.

At the same time, I’ve written several books on project management. When I was researching my 2nd book, The Project Manager’s Partner, I obtained many, many books from PMI that supported PMBOK and examined them. I also reviewed the PMP certification exam. What struck me was a key distinction that PMBOK states in its name: It is a “Body of Knowledge.” It does not pretend to be a set of skills. The test is what we performance improvement types call a “knowledge test.”

Now I wanted to write a performance-based book. So I worked hard to distill a draft set of skills (I called them 20 Key Actions & Results) that were consistent with PMBOK, but which showed observable behaviors that PMBOK seemed to imply. I then circulated these to many PM folks for feedback, revised them and used them for the basis of the book. It was a pain! But it was worth it because the book was very well received.

A few years later I learned that one of the authors (the lead author/coordinator) of the original PMBOK, Bill Duncan, was determined to go beyond PMI’s PMP certification and create a performance or competency-based certification for project managers. He spent years working with quite a few people via the new ASAPM to develop a skill-based certification or job model, so to speak. I briefly reviewed and gave feedback on this competency-based model in one of its draft iterations. Having worked to develop proprietary job models for companies, I knew that this new PM competency model was well-conceived and fairly rigorously developed.

The bottom line: I’m betting that the ASAPM’s PM Competence Model would be far more correlated with PM success than PMP certification. Check it out for yourself at: http://www.asapm.org/l_compmodel.asp

You can find my PMBOK-derived peer-reviewed 20 Key Actions & Results at this URL: http://www.michaelgreer.com/20-actns.htm

Eliseo,

I do not think that certification is a performance measure. In my experience, it doesn’t indicate anything. The certification requires too little project management talent to obtain and the topics covered by such training programs are not truly the heart of successful project management.

The fact that my top performers are not certified is just a concidence that proves out to me that what makes a good project manager is not measured for better or worse by any certifications.

B L,

1. We rate ourselves as project managers based on several abilities:
* Effective executive status
* Identification of issues (probing for jeopardy) without assistance and intervention from management
* Successful passing of project artifact reviews held by peers and managers in spot checks

2. I would put up a “Rob certified” PM against an “institute certified” one any day of the week.

3. I have done nothing to improve certification. I am not interested in the success or continuation of certification.

4. Not a bad idea.

-Rob Redmond
Struggling Manager, Author