February 11, 2010

Project management and the recession

Posted by Elizabeth

Did you complete the Arras People 2010 Project Management Benchmark survey? If so, your data has contributed to forming a picture of how the recession has affected the UK’s project and programme community over the last 18 months.

It’s the fifth annual survey that Arras have run, and that means they can set the results in a historical context, so we can see the evolving trends. The headlines this year are:

Programme and Project managers in the private sector have been hit harder than those in the public sector.
Contractors were the hardest hit group: 42% saw their pay fall compared to only 14% of public sector full-timers.
However, public sector workers are more nervous about the next phase of the economic cycle and the impact of the forthcoming general election.

Project and programme managers were also asked about their confidence for the coming year. What did they predict for 2010?

15% of contractors expect their pay to increase.
42% of employees expect their pay to increase.
30% predict steady, normal growth in 2010.
34% predict a contraction of the sector or hard times during the year.

This final figure seems pretty gloomy, but actually, the picture is better than this time last year. The per cent of people responding positively to the question about sector confidence has actually increase by 4% and the negatives are down by 5%, so in general there are small signs that people are feeling better about 2010 than they did about 2009.

And it gets better. At least, for private sector works. Last year, the private sector project and programme management community were not a happy bunch. They felt neutral about the prospects for 2009. This year, however, they responded with an increase in confidence. On the other hand, the confidence in the sector felt by public sector workers has collapsed, with 15% fewer positive responses.

So that’s the state of play for the sector. The responses about how people feel personally about going into 2010 also reflect the same levels of confidence. In the private sector, 72% of project and programme managers report feeling buoyant or steady in their careers. Public sector workers are not so positive about their personal futures. In fact, 53% of people in the public sector are expecting job cuts in the area of project and programme management this year – with 9% of them predicting that those cuts will be major.

Asking someone if they feel financially better off is not a very scientific question, but it is useful to gauge gut feel about how the recession has personally impacted project and programme managers’ finances. Unsurprisingly, very few people – only 5% – reported that they are personally much better off. Nearly 50% of people said that they were worse off, and they were split almost equally between the public and private sectors, and contractors and employees. Comparing the results to last year, private sector workers are feeling the hardest pinch, with 12% of them falling into the worse off categories this year.

The survey also provided the opportunity for people to leave verbatim comments, and as you might expect, there were several themes that came out repeatedly to do with the economic situation and personal finances:

The cost of living has gone up, but project and programme managers’ income has fallen.
There were lots of permanent staff redundancies reported during 2009.
Contractors found it more difficult – and some found it impossible – to find work during 2009.
Pay cuts or pay freezes were adopted in order to save jobs.
Employers are taking advantage of the pool of available candidates by offering packages that would have been seen as uncompetitive a while ago. Now, however, they can offer lower salaries as employees compete for work.
Day rates for contract project managers have also fallen, and some contractors have gone back to permanent work for the security that this brings.

It’s not surprising that people are feeling nervous about their job prospects during 2010. Nearly 8% of respondents to the Arras survey hadn’t worked at all during 2009, the majority of whom were previously employed in the private sector, on permanent contracts. From the whole pool of project and programme management professionals, project managers were the most likely to find themselves not working last year.

It isn’t a hugely positive picture overall for the future of project and programme managers during 2010, but it is a bit better than last year. And that’s something to be grateful for.

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