Any good lesson on how to grow Project Managers? [closed]

Question

As part of the Project Management journey I have started with my Company I am planning to grow Project Management capability within the Company Functions by creating a training program for future Project Managers.

In my current strategy I am including formal PRINCE2 foundation training, attendance to 3 1hr webinars I'll develop with Function Leaders focused on Company knowledge to give the trainee an exhaustive view of the business, and a mandatory requirement to execute a real Project, either as PM or Project Support. On top I will set up a bi-monthly Community of Practice call where the trainees will be able to share their Projects and learning.

How you do it in your Company? Any lesson to share on this?

Answer 1

I can recommend you two things:

• Don't just give them exhaustive view of the business, also establish clear goals and expectations for the area that each future project manager will manage. This will be very useful in the future when evaluating performance as well.

• Invest time in creating suitable company wide documentation (core processes, manuals, best practices for project managers -do's and don'ts for example-) along with this training sessions. People needs to communicate this processes anyway, so it's better to have them documented formally. The other reason to do this is that you then will know better what is actually important to put into the training sessions you are preparing, I would expect that part of this documentation is "self-learning" so it'll not be required to be part of your training sessions.

Don't dedicate huge amounts of time trying to get it perfect. Do a "good" first iteration of the process and get feedback from your program managers, and of course keep iterating. This is particularly important because this new practices seem new to your company, so I would ship early and then iterate.

In the book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, they explain in more detail why is important to make employees understand the expectations of their work and give some guidance about the good or bad practices that project managers get into.