Certification & Hiring

IT project manager should have certain traits and skills to allow him to manage resources, team members, stakeholders, and lead the project success. The project manager should be good in communication, able to motivate team and stakeholders, understand team behaviors and personalities to be able to lead them, identify risks and manage them, as well project manager should have knowledge in certain areas to be able to succeed in hi career, those are procurement, HR, integration, risk, and a lot more. For that IT project manager should have certain organizational skills, knowledge in certain areas, and experience in IT to be able to successfully lead IT projects.

Project management certification such as PMI and PRINCE2 adds a level of respect to the certified candidate, and accredits that the certified candidate has the required knowledge to lead projects. It is the first step to allow a candidate to manage IT projects, however they are not sufficient. There are many traits and skills that are more important and critical on the project success, and those are more important that the certifications. Starkweather & Stevenson conducted a research to investigate the importance of project management certification and found that for recruiters and IT executives PMP certification is the least valued and recognized of other fifteen core competencies (Starkweather & Stevenson, 2011). There research found that project management certification has no relation with increased success rate of IT projects (Starkweather & Stevenson, 2011). It is important to understand the importance of the PMP certification, as candidate get to know the required skills that help them to manage projects, and introfuce the knowledge area required for them to pursue there job, however alone and without IT project management experience it is not sufficient to produce a good project manager. A candidate with the required IT knowledge and experience, and has the soft skills needed to manage projects could be sent to a training program to leverage his skills, researchers in 1990s concluded that effective project management evolved with experience (Stevenson & Ann, 2010). Project management certifications give candidates the guideline to manage IT projects, however managing a billion dollar project might come once in a lifetime, and no training program could ever translate the experience acquired in such opportunity.

In conclusion, I will not consider hiring a certified project manager without adequate and relevant experience in IT projects; on the other hand I will be hiring the experienced project manager although he acquired no certification. Without experience, certified project managers has certain knowledge and they might not has the skills, or the personality to lead and handle project conflicts, this could only be acquired by experience.

Reference:

Deborah H. Stevenson, & Jo Ann, S 2010, 'PM critical competency index: IT execs prefer soft skills', International Journal Of Project Management, 28, pp. 663-671, ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost, viewed 9 June 2012

Starkweather, J. A. and Stevenson, D. H. (2011), PMP® certification as a core competency: Necessary but not sufficient. Proj Mgmt Jrnl, 42: 31–41. doi: 10.1002/pmj.20174