Coaching for Project Management Excellence, By Amro Elakkad, PMP, M.Sc.

Many years ago, I was co-managing a Project Management Office that was made up of around 40 project managers. Many of those project managers inherited their projects, and so they became managers of projects. Many of those project managers were really engineers who lacked proper project management training or experience. I found myself thinking of training courses for these folks, until someone suggested that I coach those project managers. “Oh, coaching?” I said.

Coaching and mentoring others provide an alternative to training, something that can be much more practical. While training is a good practice that helps someone gain good knowledge in short amount of time, coaching does not disrupt the work flow, take away your people (for couple of days or so), does not have to provide manuals and exercises (which some people don’t like) and can be quite a non-expensive alternative. Coaching can also be done at your (and the candidate’s) pace and time table.

Coaching, as defined in this article, is helping a project manager enhance his/her ability and explore potential areas of weakness to focus on, through the sharing of best-practices and offering advice and guidance where needed.

So, how do you do coaching exactly? While this is not an exact science, here is how I, personally, did it:

Identify your candidates. You would want to start by finding out who from your department or realm of your domain should be coached and who should be trained. While coaching, in my opinion, best fits junior project managers, it can equally apply to senior project managers, who want to improve a particular weakness or develop a certain area of expertise.
Interview your candidate. Start by sitting down with the person(s) you want to coach (we will call him/her the “candidate”) and assess their weaknesses and strengths. This will help you identify what to focus on and will help you establish a success criterion later on for your coaching effort.
Ask the candidate to make a wish-list of what he/she thinks you should focus on during the coaching. If your assessment from item 1 and the candidate’s wish-list match, then that’s great. If they don’t match, then you will need to know why the candidate thinks differently than the assessment you have for him/her and come to some sort of an agreement.
Make a “coaching” plan. Put together a plan that involves the goal, the approach, the scope, the success criteria and an execution plan. The plan will build on both 1 and 2 above.

Goal: The plan should include the goal of the plan. What are you trying to accomplish and in what time frame?
Scope: List here the specific areas that you will focus on during coaching, which really is the scope of your effort. This list should have been identified from both 1 and 2 above.
The approach to coaching: Are you going to accompany the candidate to his/her meetings? Are you going to check on his/her communications and give feedback? Are you going to spot-check some of his artifacts for chances to improve them? Are you going to give the candidate some tasks (a homework of some sort) to do and check back with him/her later on? Or all of the above and more?
Success criteria: How would you know that you have succeeded in your coaching? What do you expect to have changed of the candidate project management skills and how to measure that?
The “execution” plan is where the details of how you will execute the coaching plan will reside. Think of this as a project schedule with the different tasks or activities that you will do with the candidate to coach him. Include here all that is to be done: meetings, communications, reviews, artifacts checks, etc. Include also shared tasks as well as individual tasks to be done by the candidate alone.

Execute the “coaching” plan. Follow your plan, after you have discussed it (and modified it) with the candidate.

Coaching can be a very rewarding experience when done right. You will likely develop a good bond with your candidate and continue to communicate for years to come. I have maintained some of the contacts for the project managers that I coached. Even now, I still get emails asking me for feedback on things that my project managers did and if I would have done it differently.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and do your coaching today.

© 2011 allPM.com

Amro Elakkad (M.Sc., PMP) is a senior program manager, who has managed, executed and implemented projects and programs exceeding USD $17 billion in value for Fortune 500 companies. Amro is also a speaker, executive coach, and consultant. He has over twenty two years of experience in the information technology, financial, engineering, education, and government industries. He has special expertise in risk management, portfolio management and setting up PMOs in the global arena. Amro has published numerous papers and articles in project management-related magazines and conferences. He can be reached at a_elakkad@yahoo.com.

Artykuł opublikowany dzięki uprzejmości International Institute for Learning, Inc.

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Coaching for Project Management Excellence, By Amro Elakkad, PMP, M.Sc.