Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
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P PROjECT MANAGEMENT MatchiNg coMpeteNcy to coMplexity project MaNager developMeNt: by Chris Thatcher 12 APRIL/MAY 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com t raining, he recalls, was informal to say the least. "I learned terminology on the job. There was training at the time, but it was as-available, and it would depend very much on your project team and leader, how much time they focused on the training and how much time they fo- cused on running the project. No one talked about various com- plexities with projects." Today, Bramwell leads the implementation of a Department of National Defence-wide initiative to establish and grow project management competencies as the Canadian Armed Forces moves ahead on its largest recapitalization in recent history. Last summer, the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff (VCDS) signed off on a departmental initiative known as the Project Man- agement Competency Development initiative (PMCD) that will provide a structure for the necessary training project managers require to align their knowledge and skills with the risks and com- plexities of procurement programs. Project management has at least a 50-year history in DND, with a number of challenging courses available, including the highly re- garded Defence Resource Management course run by the VCDS staff, but as Bramwell experienced firsthand, much of the onus to complete courses has been left up to individual managers or project leaders. Though many in defence project management have been dis- cussing the need for a competency framework for some time, Trea- sury Board Secretariat provided the impetus in 2008 with changes to its policy on project management, specifically the introduction of the Project Complexity and Risk Assessment, or PCRA, a four- level evaluation of a project, from basic to very complex. With a clear need to better measure DND project managers against the PCRA, Dan Ross, then the Assistant Deputy Minister of Materiel, pushed forward an action plan to align training with the level of knowledge and experience required to successfully manage proj- ects; it also incorporated areas of training not previously required for project managers. "[We wanted] to have a system in place so that we could dem- onstrate to Treasury Board that we had project managers with the skill sets to handle projects at the various levels of complexity and risk," explained Bramwell, who serves as director of the Project Management Support Organization in ADM (MAT). "It wasn't like we were not doing training, but it was not in a framework as we have now." Building behavioural skills Drawing on the work of international organizations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI), the International Project Management Association (IPMA), the Association of Project Managers in the United Kingdom, the Australian Defence Ma- terial Organization (DMO) and the American Defense Acquisi- tion University, in 2008 the PMCD team began developing the standards and evaluation methodology for competencies related to three areas: technical knowledge; management and leadership skills (also known as the behavioural domain); and contextual understanding of the procurement and project management pro- cesses in DND and across government. They then conducted two sequential pilot programs, the latter of which concluded in 2012, to validate the competencies. The first pilot allowed existing project managers to measure themselves against the draft standards with a self-evaluation tool, providing feedback that resulted in changes to the framework; the second trialed simulation exercises developed in collaboration with the Public Service Commission's Personnel Psychology Centre to gauge behavioural skills and the ability to think on one's feet. Though technical competencies feature prominently in many of the PM Level 1 courses, and understanding activities such as how to do a Treasury Board submission, a statement of work or a work When Eric Bramwell first arrived in Ottawa in 1986 as a Lieutenant Commander and a naval architect, his initial exposure to project management was on the TRUMP program to update and modernize the Royal Canadian Navy's 1970s-era Tribal-class destroyers. Eric Bramwell