Defining a career and job framework for the project management community

During 2008/2009, Engen embarked on a project to develop a career and job framework for project managers and related positions. In this case study, Gail Wildschut, the sponsor for the project, looks back on the project and what can be learned from its conduct and implementation.

The original stated objective for the project was “to provide a career path which cohesively links together the job, recruitment and performance processes”.

The focus was on the Strategic Initiatives (SI) department that runs the Information Services (IS) business projects.

It became clear, however, that the aim would need to be more ambitious. We changed the objective quite substantially to “create a Project and Programme Management (PPM) career framework which can be rolled out as a best-practice ‘organisation template’ across Engen.”

This considerably widened the stakeholder consultation group beyond IS, but also meant that we were able to gain the interest and commitment from key stakeholder groups such as Human Resources.

While it would be fair to say that we did not achieve fully against this objective, and many areas in the business remain untouched by the new standards, we have made significant inroads and put in place the infrastructure (job families and competence descriptions) to allow further exploitation at a future date.

Using the PMI (Project Management Institute) career development framework, we identified nine major roles in the project community (Figure 1). These defined the scope of the roles to be encompassed by the project.

Figure 1: Project community roles



Six critical success factors (CSFs) were identified for the project – these gave us the guiding principles for decision-making and management activity. If it was on this list, then we had to strive to achieve it, else the project could be deemed to fail.

CSF1: The implementation is seen as legitimate and fair by members of the project management community

The communication plan used a combination of workshops, one-to-one meetings and dissemination of documents. Unsurprisingly, the more staff were involved in the project, the more they felt the process fair.

The groups with which we were dealing were quite large, thus we enlisted the help of group co-ordinators – this worked with varying degrees of success.

We originally had attempted to have the groups elect their own reps, but found it most successful where an independent from another group facilitated, for example, we used a PM2 (Project manager – level 2) to facilitate Project Assistant meetings.

Using known standards, we used the PMI competency standards as the basis for the development, which was regarded positively by the community. We clearly “weren’t just making this up!”

The design challenge was in contextualising the standards to manageable proportions without losing the essence of the standards. The PMI competency standards provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the knowledge and skills required – the behavioural competencies are still less convincing and the challenge for us was in linking these back into the core Engen leadership competencies.

We found it better to start with the Engen leadership standards – which, we felt, more comprehensively covered behaviours – and then link these with the information in the PMI standard. This also had the added benefit of improving the buy-in from corporate HR, as we showed conformance with the global standards being introduced across the company.

CSF2: The process for moving people to new job roles is clear, open and credible

Over time, a number of job roles and job names have been adopted for people working in projects in Engen. We wanted to rationalise these and reduce the proliferation of names in the future.

This was definitely a change management concern.

There were two main approaches we could adopt: We could assess people against the new job roles and work out which role and level they should be working at. This was most controversial around the PM1-PM3 (project manager, levels 1-3) job roles. Or we could simply review their current job descriptions against the new ones and then match the old job description to the nearest new description.

From consultations with HR, it became clear that, while option one gave us the opportunity to better understand the capability we had available in our population, it would be one step too far, too early.

In the end, we took a cautious approach – using the job description comparison approach, we gradually are moving current staff to the new job profiles as part of the annual performance reviews and ensuring that all new staff are recruited onto the new job profiles.

CSF3: The processes for engagement and performance management of contractors can be aligned with the new framework

We were very conscious that with so many contractors involved in projects, it would be impossible to make this initiative work, unless there was some alignment of how we recruited and managed project managers in the permanent and contract communities.

The job profiles themselves were an obvious point of commonality between the groups. No matter whether the person was on contract or permanent, the job purpose, outcomes and skills requirements were the same.

The mindset was very clear – a PM2 should look and feel like a PM2, regardless of where he/she comes from. How the selection process was managed, would inevitably differ, but the technical selection criteria were the same.

Performance and career management were more tricky issues, as these are outside our remit when working with contract staff.

While we could use the general performance statements for the project managers to evaluate how well a person was doing – the process of performance management between contract and permanent staff clearly was going to be very different.

We engaged with the labour brokers as stakeholders. As customers, we were in a position to stipulate that future contracts would include a matching against our job profiles. In the longer term, we also would like to work in partnership with the brokers to encourage performance management in line with PMI standards.

We believe that this is in the best interests of Engen, the individual contractors and of the project professional community in general, as it promotes excellence in project management skills.

CSF4: The implications of other initiatives are understood and factored into our approach

One of the drivers for starting this project was an internal HR corporate talent management programme. All departments were being asked to update their job and performance management documentation in line with new standards (leadership competencies) and new performance and talent management systems being implemented by HR.

It seemed like a good opportunity to satisfy our needs for better PM career and performance management, while at the same time delivering the products required by HR. We engaged actively with the HR team and were part of their working group.

A major success for the project was that we were able to gain agreement for the project and programme management to be recognised as a core job family for
the organisation.

In the past, this role had been hidden away in the IS job family without recognition of project management as a core competence across many of the activities with which we are involved at Engen. It also made it easier for us to gain recognition and sign off for our job documentation by HR.

On the downside, attempting to co-ordinate the outputs and timing of two parallel initiatives is always difficult.

We undoubtedly ended up committing significant effort to rework our documentation, as the HR design was not stable and subject to change. This created a difficult scoping issue and in the end, we compromised by base-lining the job profiles as adequate for our purposes, but as requiring revisiting once the talent management initiative approach
was established.

In hindsight, this still has placed us in a better position than many job families. We have gained real benefits from engaging in the improvement of our job documentation while for some groups, the HR talent management process has been more of a paper exercise, simply rehashing existing documents into new formats.

Figure 2: Career paths

CSF5: The remuneration of jobs can be aligned with external market valuations of the same (or similar) roles

This proved to be a real win. The PMI job roles are the same as the job titles used by HR to conduct industry salary surveys. All jobs have to be evaluated by HR against industry-accepted job standards.

These are used also by HR for salary and other related surveys. The simple mapping made gaining acceptance for the roles far easier to do than it may have been otherwise.

We chose to use a similar approach with the labour brokers. A ‘rates card’ was created. Each job was described in terms of the skills and experience required, derived directly from the job descriptions used for permanent staff. Labour brokers were asked to indicate fees using a banded rating, thus allowing the labour broker to stipulate the range of fees they would expect to be charging for the various job roles.

CSF6: The work is co-ordinated with the delivery of the new organisational structure for strategic initiatives

The clarifying of project community roles meant we also needed to improve the clarity of who does what and who reports to whom.

In particular, it was important to establish the role of the project management office in supporting and managing project resources.

The portfolio co-ordinator’s role was new and it was very important to ensure that reporting lines within SI were re-aligned with the new structure.

Interesting questions, such as who allocates project managers, who deals with performance issues, needed to be rethought in light of the new clarity around jobs.

An interesting exercise to help in this was the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) review workshop. The existing job descriptions for the portfolio co-ordinator and portfolio manager were analysed on paper. It soon became clear that there were areas of overlap in the job responsibilities.

In the workshop, we looked at each of the job performance areas and asked the question – who was Responsible, who was Accountable, who was Consulted and who was Informed.

It was clear that we would be running a ‘matrixed’ reporting structure.

The RACI exercise helped us drive out where confusions may lie for staff so that we could consider how best to address these.

Other insights and values gained from the project

Looking back on the project, the big values for us have been the clarity around the roles in project and programme management. The levels of project manager have allowed us to have real debate and focus on what we mean by project management and what expectations we have of the various levels of project manager.

The use of PM1-PM3 levels gave us a language and terminology to talk about the different levels of project management.

When discussing recruitment, we do not merely talk about wanting a project manager, but about the level of project manager we require. And it is not always PM3.

Actually, we feel the most flexible level is the PM2.

PM3s are more difficult to obtain and they require very challenging projects or programmes to keep them engaged.

On the refinery projects that are complex and business know-how intensive, we have long-term contractors in PM3 roles. In SI, we are more likely to bring in a contract PM3 in response to a specific technology or complex project need.

With career paths now better mapped out, I believe we also have been incentivised to encourage the development of internal staff into project roles. We are more confident about bringing in juniors and how we will go about developing them up through their careers.

We also have realistic expectations about how this can be achieved and in what time frames. I personally believe this is key for Engen and South Africa to develop more people up the PM skills ladder.

Looking at career paths was very helpful in getting us to reflect on what we meant by each job. For example, it is possible in Engen for somebody to progress from an administrative role such as the project co-ordinator to a change manager role.

This raises the question of what is meant by “change management” and if we require two types of change managers:

* Type 1 – a more junior role would focus on communication management and activity follow-throughs.
* Type 2 – would most likely be an organisational change expert with experience in the business (indeed, he/she may well best sit in the business area).

This debate is still ongoing.

Another very interesting issue that emerged from the work was what we really meant by “programmes” and what a “programme manager” was.

Figure 3: Project manager roles and project complexity

Was it helpful in IS for us to have three PM roles of PM1-PM3 and a programme manager role?

In the end, we decided that the role of programme manager should be reserved for management of major business programmes such as those found in the refinery. We therefore aim to use only PM1-PM3 jobs in IS – no doubt this debate will continue!

This clarity on jobs has impacted on not only our job and career framework, but also on organisational structures and project practices. The PMO has been very involved in this initiative. One opportunity we saw to support the development of staff was to set up ‘starter kits’.

This starter kit is like a mini induction pack with the process and procedure documentation along with suggestions on how best to apply processes such as governance and roles and responsibilities.

It was also clear that given the multiple roles in the project community, project assistants, PM1-3, and the PMO, it was important to provide an understanding between and across groups about what could be expected and how each group could help the other.

We are implementing ‘service packs’ that define the types of services offered by each role. The most advanced is for project assistants, where we found it helpful to differentiate the services offered by the level of complexity of the project and the project stage. Next year, we aim to build upon this work for project manager, change managers and sponsors.

The ability to identify what project management capability we have, means in theory that we can improve capacity planning.

In practice, we find that the IS area is limited primarily by the technical expertise to do the work. But once we have a view of our portfolio (in terms of what project and the level of complexity), we will be in a very good position to identify what capacity we require in the project community and match this to what we have.

Figure 3 illustrates the basis of our approach. We developed a complexity model for categorising our projects in terms of size and complexity and then, in a workshop, matched this against the skills and experience of each of our job roles.

Thus, for example, the lilac boxes illustrate where PM1s are ‘safe to operate’ – this does not mean we will not use them on the more complex projects, but does indicate where we should be careful and may need to provide support.

This modelling has allowed us to look more carefully at our portfolio demands and can be more proactive in matching the capability of the project management pool to the demands of the business.

This will be a real value-added win to the organisation.

I also feel that I have better tools and information to really justify the resourcing required to deliver the IS portfolio.

Lessons learned

The project has not delivered all its required outcomes.

The decision to cease it was based on the view that it had delivered sufficient products, but now we needed to catch up the change processes to really ensure we were able to exploit the benefits in the project organisation.

There are definite actions that we know we must take – and, most importantly, we know what and how we may go about these.

In hindsight, the things that allowed us to progress this far on the project were:

* A real focus on stakeholders – We estimate that more than a third of the effort was related to SH management activities, but this already is paying dividends in terms of acceptance in the business.
* Outcome and design clarity – Right from the start, we mapped out the products to be delivered for a complete performance management system and identified how each product was related. This meant that the technical scope was clear; we then had to decide how much we should deliver, given the amount of change we realistically could expect to implement.
* A job analyst and project manager who had the proven project and HR skills necessary to gain the confidence of the main stakeholders groups.

This article was co-authored by Gail Wildschut and Louise Worsley.

Wildschut is the strategic initiatives manager in Information Services, responsible for the Project Portfolio and the Project Management Office for IS at Engen Petroleum.

Worsley ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) was the project manager and lead designer for the work and is the managing director of Projman cc, an organisation specialising in project management capability development.

• 07/01/2010 08:33 - A little risk is a good thing

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