Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/304887
P PROjECT MANAGEMENT www.vanguardcanada.com APRIL/MAY 2014 13 breakdown structure are all important, much of the program in the second and third levels is aimed at developing behaviour and contextual skills and knowledge. "More than 50 percent of the coursing is actually outside pure project management, it is what you need to move up in the pub- lic service as a manager," Bramwell said. "You would need those behavioural and contextual skill sets even if you weren't going to be a project manager." Members of the military usually arrive in project management with well-honed leadership capabilities, while civilians often enter with strong technical backgrounds. Both need grounding in gov- ernment minutia of project approvals and the inner workings of various departments, especially DND. Sometimes, they also need training in the management of each other: the framework includes courses on managing civilians for a military supervisor and man- aging military for civilian supervisors. While many of the courses are delivered by outside agencies such as the Canada School of Public Service, the three PMCD levels of project manager qualification correspond approximately with Treasury Board Secretariat's PCRA levels of project com- plexity and risk. Bramwell said the framework is also looking to add training on very complex project management by adapting courses offered as part of the executive masters program in complex project manage- ment at the University of Queensland in Australia: "One on systems thinking, how to deal with a continuously changing environment; relational contracting, because when you get into very complex contracts, it is really as much about the organization you are dealing with and the people involved as it is about the terms and conditions in the black and white; and business acumen, making sure that we as public servants and military have a better insight into industry, because we are often accused of being in our ivory tower and [writ- ing] statements of work that don't make sense to industry." PMCD leaders are also interested in other opportunities to learn from industry. Some courses, in fact, feature guest speakers and a recent pilot, in which one company hosted instructors from Queensland University and invited DND project management staff to attend, proved very successful. A nine-year road Though the timelines are not fixed in stone, each PM level requires approximately three years to complete. "We are trying not to be too hard and fast," Bramwell explained. "We need to be flexible to adapt to different people's career patterns. We also recognize that if you are working outside of Ottawa, in a project milieu, even if it isn't a formal capital project, you can be getting relevant experience and we want to make sure people are aware of that." To assist with that, the PMCD team is exploring the possibility of offering some of its courses online. "We don't own many of the courses so our ability to influence delivery is limited. But we are looking at where we can," Bramwell said. He added that human resources managers responsible for posting military members are now aware of the framework and over time it is likely to be a con- sideration in posting decisions. Flexibility, he reiterated, will be key to how the PMCD rolls out for both existing and new project managers. He equates the implementation phase to changing the wheels on a moving ve- hicle: since the entire capital program can't be stopped "while we spend nine years training our PM3s from start to finish, we need to be able to insert training along the way; now we've got people whose job it is to look at how can we make some of that better." Though the initiative is less than a year into implementation, there are already some signs of success: PMCD qualification is starting to show up in job postings as a preferred asset. "People are not putting it as mandatory because it is too early, but it is validation and some publicity," Bramwell said. The DPS effect As proof of that need for flexibility, in February the government announced a new Defence Procurement Strategy that, among other objectives, aims to streamline the procurement process and leverage the purchase of military equipment to generate jobs and