At the PMO Flashmob last night we were talking about PMO competencies. It was good to start a discussion on what is required to be a PMO person. If we can start as a profession to understand what is required from the role then we can start to get people who can improve and lead the profession onwards.
However as a group of people gathered in the room we found that difficult to do. I found it interesting that we found it easy to talk about some of the technical competencies that were required for the role e.g. updating logs, registers, dependency maps, starting projects.
What we found difficult to do was to put down anything around the soft skills (not sure why they are called that as they are quite hard to get right). On a lot of the linked in discussions I see we talk about what is required for a successful PMO. The answers seem to come back to the same things. It’s about the behaviours that people demonstrate. This includes leadership, influencing, learnability, inquisitiveness, pragmatism. Not sure that some of those can exactly be linked to competencies. However it surely has to be worth a try.
As a starter for 10 we looked at the competencies that have been developed for project managers, which gave a framework we could look at. We had a discussion about how different was the competencies required for a PMO person from that list. It should be noted that the list didn’t have behavioural attributes on it. I suggest that this is probably missing the competencies that you might find in an Analyst role,
I do wait to see what the Flashmob make of the consolidated lists that will come out, and I would like to see if we can get the necessary people together to get a competency framework together and off the ground. That then will give us something to judge ourselves against.