5 themes recruiters are looking for

Melanie Franklin, CEO of Maven Training, spoke about the market trends hitting project management at a breakfast event in London, UK, recently.

Franklin, who is the author of three books on the soft skills required for project management, spends a lot of time consulting on what organizations need to do in order to deliver better projects.  She’s in and out of board rooms and she hears what people want from project management professionals.  At the moment, these are the trending topics.

Organizations want:

• Knowledge and understanding of best practice
• Technical project management skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Specialist knowledge in a relevant industry sector
• PRINCE2 on your CV

She also said that there’s a wider trend away from ‘project management’ towards PPM, PPRM or P3.  If those acronyms don’t mean anything to you they are:

PPM:  project and programme management
PPRM:  project, programme and risk management
P3:  project, programme and portfolio management.

At interview you should be able to talk knowledgeably about the fact that PPM is the delivery of organisational change and development capability, as opposed to project management which is ‘just’ getting something done.  At board level the discussions now are about programmes and portfolios, which translates as doing the right thing for the business, and not just doing projects for the sake of it.

Those weren’t the words Franklin used exactly, but she was clear that project delivery is about staying OTOBOS and programme delivery is about delivering an outcome or vision and a more strategic change or business transformation.  In summary, when she is hiring or advising people on hiring, she looks for various key skills as follows.

In a project manager:

• Delegation
• Planning
• Delivery on time
• Cost management
• Quality management
• Risk management
• Change management and managing the impact of those changes
• Requirements gathering
• How scope is presented and checked and how often.

In a programme manager:

• Benefits management and realization
• Stakeholder management
• Ability to manage uncertainty with innovation, problem solving skills and creativity
• Ability to manage problems without constantly referring them up.

For both jobs Franklin said she would look at how recent is the candidate’s investment in their knowledge.  For example, if you are going for a job as a project manager you are presenting yourself as an expert in project management.  So how true is this?  When did you last attend an event or networking evening, training course or seminar?  How is this reflected on your CV?  It doesn’t have to cost a lot (read this article for some ideas on things that you can do without corporate investment) but it does have to be recent.

So now you know what employers are looking for in terms of both wide trends and specific skills – good luck with the job hunting!

Performing a Market Analysis for Your Software Project Solution – Part 4

In Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3 of this series on performing a market analysis, I’ve covered the following phases:

• Phase 1 – Documenting the Requirements
• Phase 2 – Identify the Potential Sources
• Phase 3 – Vendor Invitation
• Phase 4 – Vendor Research – Round 1
• Phase 5 – More Detailed Vendor Research – Round 2

We are now on to Phase 6 – Final Vendor Demos, which will involve very deep dives into each remaining vendor’s product offerings against your detailed requirements.

Phase 6 – Final Vendor Demos

At the conclusion of Phase 5, we narrowed the vendor field from 4-6 vendors down to a final list of 2-3 vendors. During Phase 5 you most likely laid out the remainder of the process of the 4-6 vendors you were still considering, but we’ll detail that here at the beginning of Phase 6.

In this phase, we will:

• Provide the vendors with a lengthy list of detailed requirements
• Setup detailed face-to-face vendor demos either onsite at the customer location (that’s us) or at a centralized location (really only necessary if the customer has a dispersed team)
• Meet as a team following each detailed vendor demo to perform scoring, compare notes, make preliminary decisions about the vendor

Detailed Requirements

If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to share a very detailed list of requirements with each of the remaining vendors. What you’re looking for in this phase is to witness a demo tailored to your final solution in as much detail as possible to help you and your team make the best and final choice of a vendor solution. This can really only be accomplished by giving them everything you can in the way of information about what you need your ‘to-be’ solution and processes to look like.

Try to stay away from giving them too much direction about what you want to see. After all, the winning vendor is going to be expected to fully understand your requirements, notice where they are week and ask for more info, and configure their solution to your needs. If you have to do the work for them along the way then they’re not the right vendor.

Face-to-Face Detailed Demos

Now is the time to meet the vendors face-to-face. You’ve given them every detailed piece of information about what you need and you’ve given them a period of time (probably 2 weeks or more) to put together a detailed presentation and demo that will be tailored – at least in terms of discussion – toward how they can meet your requirements.

If your undertaking is large enough and warrants the drooling that would go along with it, then it may call for asking the vendors to put together a working prototype of what they would implement in your environment. This could only be asked of the largest of undertakings where winning this contract could make or break the vendor. No vendor is going to go to this time or effort for a normal implementation – the costs would be far too high. And if you need to go down this route, understand that you will need to give the vendors months, not weeks, to prepare for these detailed demos.

My recommendation is to stay away from working prototypes if at all possible and ask the vendors to perform very detailed deep dives into their offerings while addressing your specific requirements along the way.

Post Demos Reviews

As a team, conduct post demos reviews, compare notes and do some preliminary scoring of the vendor’s ability to meet your specific requirements. Because your requirements list is very long at this point, this process will take a considerable amount of time and needs to be done immediately following each demo so the information is fresh in everyone’s mind. It’s a good idea to do this separately as individuals and then come back together to discuss and agree on final scorings for each vendor on each requirement or groups of similar requirements or come up with an ‘average’ score for each requirement or group of requirements for each vendor. This will be critical when doing the final comparison, scoring and decision-making in Phase 7.

Next

In Phase 7 we will discuss the process of performing final scoring, identifying the final selection, notifications across all vendors and what to do with the runner-ups.