ProjectExperts Supports asapm Advancement Efforts

Since its founding in 2001, asapm®, American Society for the Advancement of Project Management, has enjoyed the strong support of the ProjectExperts. Although we have also been supporters of Project Management Institute since 1983 (and will continue to be), we know there is room for more than one professional project management association in America. And, a key point: supporting the PM Institute is not nearly as differentiating in the PM Consulting market as it was in 1983.

Our asapm support is based on the revolutionary range of initiatives it is pursuing to advance the practice of competent project management. For example, asapm's stance on intellectual property encourages authors to keep the rights to their own work. This is encouraging greater sharing of information and truly best PM practices than we've seen in the recent past.

asapm Initiatives
Among the initiatives asapm is working on, and that we support, are the following:

Performance-Competence Based PM Certification: Building an internationally-recognized, multi-level, performance-competence-based certification of Project Managers (whew! maybe you want to read that again). asapm is verifying Performance Competence, not just knowledge, and evaluating practitioner performance as a Project Manager instead of memorized knowledge about Project Management. That is a clear differentiator for any practitioner who understands the difference. And, asapm acknowledges that different projects (by type, size and complexity) need different levels of competence and demonstrated skills.

Standards: Recognizing that there is little need to re-invent what already exists, asapm is embracing the current ANSI standard Project Management BoK. And why not? One of asapm's founders was the original version's primary author. asapm is extending its usefulness, by establishing the USA National Competnce Baseline (NCB). This is useful not just for Project Managers, but also for all other key project stakeholders. ProjectExperts' own PM CompModel is a pivotal tool in supporting that USA-NCB standard. Thus we develop Competence and Performance on the same foundations of basic knowledge.

Learning and Development: Improving the relevance and usefulness of Project Manager education. As long-time PM Learning and consulting providers, it has been disconcerting to us to see the increase in training offerings that merely help people cram to pass a test, rather than doing anything to improve their Project Manager effectiveness. Some companies have used their entire training budgets on such programs, then blame those who achieved certification for project failures—as if it was their fault. We support asapm's strategy of improving project and program performance by improving skills, behavioral attributes and competences of project and program managers, and of all other key stakeholders. Again, our PM CompModel is asapm's key (and yours) to closing gaps and improving PM Stakeholder competence.

Membership: Expanding the range of PM influence. In the early days (well, at least our early days) of PM, there were a mere handful of industries represented in most Project Management organizations, and it was often just the top-level, expert Project Managers who participated.

Today there is broad recognition that Project Manager competences are appropriate for almost all students, workers and managers, in all industries, professions and careers. asapm's greatest contribution may be its Enterprise-wide reinforcement of the discipline, from the Executive Suite, to Resource (Middle) Managers, to Team Members and individual contributors. Thus asapm's potential target USA audience is in the range of over two hundred million people—the number of people in the above groups, from student through retiree. And, as the USA member of International Project Management Association, asapm is helping the World's billions to also benefit from competent project management.

ProjectExperts Support
How does ProjectExperts help with all this asapm effort?

Certification: We participated in the definition of the multi-level Performance-Based Competence certification. However, our purpose in participating is not to develop cert-cram courses: Any effective Project Managers' Learning curriculum that teaches participants how to be more effective Project Managers will help you prepare for asapm certification.

To help improve industry focus on improving PM Competence, we have adapted our PM CompModel (PM Competence Model) to the elements and structure of the USA National Competence Baseline, the foundation of asapm competences. We provide this tool to asapm members and interested parties.

Standards: Our Products and Learning experiences are already either compliant with current BOK standards, where we are not ahead of them. For example, the 2008 standards are looking more and more like our 24 year-old IT methodology, THE Guide, with the addition of the novel idea of collecting Requirements to better understand Scope. Moving forward, the teamwork-orientation of our curriculum perfectly positions us to support asapm's USA-NCB emphasis on the Behavioral (or Interpersonal) Attributes of Competence, in addition to the Technical Competences.

Learning and Development: Our Project Team Competence Framework, together with our tools, target and measure demonstrated performance of learning. SNAP, our Skills Needs Assessment Process, is a product and process that includes Learning needs identification, with Pre-course assessment, followed by post-session evaluation of performance of the learning objectives or class topics. Way beyond "smile sheets", SNAP helps improve project performance.

Consistently, our efforts extend beyond Knowledge transfer, with its rapid decay rate, to embrace enduring Skills, Attititudes and Competences. And now, in asapm, we have a solid framework in this quest for more effective project management competence and performance.

Membership: We've always expanded the reach of PM from Executives, to Team Members and Individual Contributors. Our curriculum has always offered a different Learning series for different levels of the organization. For example, rather than sending everyone to the same 5-day project management class, we've offered classes for team members that are shorter, focus just on the competences team members need to demonstrate, and most importantly, present from the team members' point of view.

Here is another example: Because Small Projects require special methods, our Small Project Management approach has doubled the target audiences for our PM Learning. Everyone does Small Projects: our participants learn how to manage them.

More ProjectExperts Support
Here's another way we support asapm: Why don't you join the American Society for the Advancement of Project Management, and help advance the discipline?

Stacy Goff, IPMA-D, PMP