Skills shortage creates 'citizen project managers'

Smartsheet’s inaugural ‘Future of Work Management Report’ indicates a resource recession across all industry sectors, in which organisations are forced to operate with limited skilled personnel, support or employees with suitable training and experience.

Four out of five (83%) of respondents reported that projects are managed by team members without formal qualifications or suitable experience — ‘citizen project managers’ who step up to fill the gap. Nearly one in five (18%) manage projects despite the function not being within the scope of their job title or position description. Fifty per cent of these — the ‘citizen project managers’ moving work forward — claim they were at least somewhat unprepared for the first project they managed and 17% were mostly or completely unprepared. Nearly all (90%) respondents have seen or experienced negative consequences from the challenges of working with an improperly managed project team, including having to work more hours, duplicating work and missing deadlines.

“Australia’s talent shortage means more employees are expected to assume additional work that they are not trained or qualified for,” said Nigel Mendonca, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Smartsheet.

“Instead of accepting burnout and poor business outcomes, leaders have a unique opportunity to transform the way work is done for the better by thinking innovatively when it comes to project and process management.”

Although results show that we are in a resource recession, the survey also revealed an opportunity for organisations to move towards a resource revolution. To do this, leaders need to shift away from the idea of measuring success against deadlines and instead focus on their people and implementing the right technology. In order to make this shift, the report found three key takeaways:

Support is sacred, and teams need more of it

Although the people doing the work recognise — and actively push for — support, the report found that 45% of respondents believe their organisation doesn’t staff projects appropriately, with 31% suggesting projects are understaffed. Less than half (43%) feel their company is investing as it should in tools and processes to address common project management challenges.

The ‘middle work’ is most critical to a project’s success and to avoid employee burnout

The middle work, or the tasks and processes that make up a project, is where the project moves forward, but it can also be where projects break down.

Nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents expect their company to ask project teams to accomplish even more with less in the near future, and over half (54%) expect deadlines to stay the same moving forward. This shows that things aren’t slowing down, regardless of whether teams have the resources or tools to be successful. In order to overcome these challenges, teams need to focus less on deadlines and more on the middle work that will take the project from start to finish.

Report data shows that irrespective of deadlines, there is a clear connection between effectively managed projects and job satisfaction, with almost half (45%) of survey respondents reporting that when projects run smoothly stress is lower.

Repeated work is wasted work

Projects are only as good as the processes they’re built on. Since the middle work is so critical, the best way to ensure the success of a project is to take learnings and insights and turn them into scalable, repeatable processes. The report showed that when projects have an experienced project manager, Australian respondents felt that work quality was higher (53%), more efficient (49%), within budget (42%) and that there was greater collaboration between teams (41%).

Image credit: iStock.com/LaylaBird