Enabling Career Advancement – But not for you
I came a across an interesting article on the Projects@work website, Enabling Career Advancement by Mary Ann Bopp, Diana Bing and Sheila Forte-Trammell, which is an excerpt from their book, Agile Career Development: Lessons and Approaches from IBM.
Their basic premise is that: “Project-driven organizations can benefit in many ways from creating a career framework that gives employees the opportunity to grow — and share — their knowledge and skills by moving across job roles or business units. In the process, they align company values and culture, optimize resources and increase client satisfaction.”
This information is very useful for PM professionals who have permanent, full-time jobs and for organizations whose business model calls for full-time, long-term staff as opposed to short-term, per-diem (contract) staff. However, the growing trend among organizations is to use less and less permanent resources and more temporary (per-diem) resources.
This is especially true when it comes to projects. Projects, by their very nature, are discrete and time-based. Too often, organizations can’t see beyond the end of a current project when it comes to finding and developing talent. Contract project managers along with temporary team members (often called “consultants”) are brought in for the duration of the project and let go at the end of the project. There is no value to the organization to grow the long-term skills of these temporary workers. In many cases, skill development as well as career development are seen as annoyances that just get in the way of the short-term goals of the current project. Organizations would prefer that these “consultants” would build their skills and grow their careers on somebody else’s nickel — either before they come on board or after they have successfully delivered on their short-term project and their contracts terminated.
A related trend is the attempt by organizations to use a single, temporary, contractor to fill two, very different roles. These are the, so-called, PM/BA (project manager / business analyst) spots and (for I.T. projects) the, so called, PM/Technical Lead spots. You simply can’t manage the baseball team AND play short-stop. If you try to do both, then something has to give. (See my discussion on the PM Best Practices blog: Economic Crisis).
There are some legal, financial and public relations reasons for using “temporary employees.” (1) Lack of privity between the temporary worker and the client, thus relieving the client from any legal liability or requirement to comply with tax and labor laws; (2) some cost containment and cost management, knowing that they won’t have to pay the temporary worker after the project is completed and the freedom to reduce hours during the course of the project; (3) the ability to layoff entire groups of workers without a hit to their PR — e.g., if a Fortune 500 company lays off 1,500 temporary employees, there is no report in the media that “XXX Company laid off 6% of their workforce.” Even though they did, indeed, layoff 6% of their workforce, since they weren’t “officially” employees, the layoff doesn’t get reported in the company’s turnover statistics; (4) savings on health and unemployment insurance costs, including the paperwork involved with claims.
However, I believe that the benefits (described above) are exceeded by the long-term costs to both organizations as well as to the growth and adoption of proven and repeatable project and program management standards and processes — not to mention the big hit on the careers of PM professionals. These organizations end up with a bunch of project deliverables delivered by a group of professionals who have long left the scene and moved on to another client. This short term view gets deliverables out the door, but may not deliver much value to the organization. The PMs (and their teams) rarely have the time or are given the opportunity to take the long-term view of what is happening. The organizations go from project-to-project contantly inventing the wheel over and over again. Neither the organization nor the temporary PMs they contract have much of a chance to grow.
Meanwhile, the PM professionals get a reputation for “jumping around from job to job” which is really not their fault (and very often, not their choice). Careerwise, rather than moving up a career ladder, they end up jumping sideways (and sometimes even down) on a career “jungle gym” (similar to the ones they played on in the playground of their elementary schools). At the recent (Oct, 2009) North America PMI Congress, Dr. Harold Kerzner spoke about “strategic alliances” between organizations and the consultants and consulting firms that provide the project management expertise. This gives the PM consultants the incentive to continuously hone their PM skills and their business skils if, in exchange for making the effort to do this, the organizations will form a long-term partnership with them, providing on-going business for the PM consultants. In this way, both the organizations and their PM consulting partners can grow their PM maturity together. This can go a long way to mitigating the problems associated with the overuse of “temporary employees” (as opposed to long-term, permanent staff), discussed above.
Right now, one of the biggest obstacles to achieving this partnership is the rise of the intermediary organization or “sub contactor.” The sub contractor’s only goal is to make a short-term match between a PM professional and an organization in order to collect a fee. Not only does this increase the cost to the organization and lower the earnings of the PM professional, it also gets in the way of the organization’s ability to identify and build a long-term, strategic relationship with the best PM professionals. I mentioned three of the top reasons that organizations use temporary employees, and there are many more. If organizations can somehow work around the sub-contractor obstacles or, at least, find a way to continue to gain the legal, financial and PR benefits of temporary employees while building a closer and direct relationship with the professionals in the field, the entire industry could achieve very great benefits and skilled project management professionals can build their skills, experience and their CAREERS in way that will be beneficial to both themselves and the organizations that they bring value to.
Tags: career advancement, careers, client consultant relationship, contract employees, contracting, economic crisis, employment, engagement management, financial crisis, full-time vs. consulting, hidden costs of contracting, job roles, outsourcing, Project Management Best Practices, project management jobs, resource management, short-term thinking
