4 Key Competencies Needed to be A Successful Project

The world’s leading survey “PMI Pulse of the Professional Report” (2023) among project experts from Project Management Institute (PMI) shows that four core competencies can reverse common results in project management: 80 percent of the projects can achieve their goals and financial losses Benefit misconceptions significantly.

The Project Management Institute, the world’s leading specialist organization for project management, has published the 14th edition of its pulse-of-the-professional report. This leading, annual, global survey among project experts tries to understand the most important trends in project management. This year in focus: the correlation between skills and project success.

Regardless of the region, industry, years of experience, management level, or certification status as a project management professional (PMP), all project employees surveyed agreed that the most important skills in future-oriented organizations, so-called power skills, communication, problem-solving, cooperative management, and strategic thinking are.

As explained in the PMI talent triangle, these are of crucial importance for project experts to find their way around in the changing world of work and to use innovative work methods.

Companies that use the skills mentioned in addition to the technical skills and business sense are better at dealing with complex project challenges, market changes, technological innovations, and socio-economic pressure.

In this way, projects will achieve their goal in the future

The survey showed that companies that give these skills a high priority record a direct impact on the project’s success and the associated corporate goals. 72 percent of the projects analyzed successfully achieved the business goals set, and only 28 percent of the projects had a gradual expansion of the project scope. Even if these projects did not achieve their goal, the methods used ensured that fewer budget losses (17 percent) suffered.

This report thus complements common studies that have determined that 80 percent of the projects do not achieve their project objectives and that this often goes hand in hand with great losses in financial and human resources. Even if a project goal is missed, the knowledge of the survey carried out by the Project Management Institute (PMI) shows that the use of the four power skills from the perspective of project experts helps to be lower.

See Also: 7 Factors For Guaranteed Failure

Every tenth project in the Czech Republic is seen as a budget waste

In the Czech Republic, in particular, the findings of the pulse-of-the-professional report have a high level of relevance. In this way, the respondents state that every tenth project was a waste of budget from their point of view and that 14 percent of the projects are considered failed as a whole. This value is twice as high in global comparison as it is in the Czech Republic.

The value of all successful projects is also almost 5 percent below the global average of 67 percent in the Czech Republic. After all, the work of the project managers working in the Czech Republic with the pan-European comparison: Here, too, project experts state that around 67 percent of all projects achieve their goal.

However, the reasons for the failure of projects. From the point of view of the respondents, the Czech Republic does poorly in both the pan-European and global comparison. With 27 (Europe) or 29 percent (global) of the projects, the scope shrinks together in the course of the project work.

In the Czech Republic, according to the Project Management Institute (PMI), this is even 42 percent. This adjusts almost every second project during its implementation. These findings are reinforced by the fact that financial compromises must also be made in every third project, while this is only globally every fifth project or in European comparison only every fourth project.

Missing measurability makes qualification difficult

It is all the more astonishing that companies continue to invest every second lesson (46 percent) in the development and expansion of technical skills and only almost every third training hour flows into the establishment and expansion of power skills (29 percent).

This also does not change the opinion of the respondents, at which nine out of ten project employees state that Power Skills help them to work more intelligently. Companies are therefore faced with the challenge of prioritizing the development of power skills. As the reason for this, the pulse-of-the-professional report 2023 leads costs as the greatest obstacle to employee development, followed by a lack of perceived value.

The report thus proves what is every day in many companies: The lack of measurability between training and further education for corporate goals is often a stumbling block for important projects.

“Our organization is committed to ensuring that project employees develop the most solid skills to keep up and make a difference,” said Pierre Le Manh, President and Chief Executive Officer of the PMI.

“Technical skills and business sense will always be important in project management, but this study shows that organizations and project managers also have to give priority to the development of power skills to achieve the best possible project results.”

Info: A total of 3,492 project experts from various industries and regions were interviewed for the creation of this report, including North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, China, Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, the Asian-Pacific area and Africa south of the Sahara.

The report was supplemented by 12 detailed interviews with project management experts from various industries and regions. The full report can be found on the PMI power skills resource hub.