Advertising for a job - expertise or experience

Neil Richardson, Managing Practitioner

Project (IT Delivery) Manager required to join a large government organisation.  We need:

• SCRUM development methodology, Certified PRINCE 2, AGILE
• JAVA, Oracle, Weblogic
• Lead direction setting, overall planning, dependency management and risk mitigation the development cycle
• Integration issues: including RLR, MDS, Release 11, ESB and Infrastructure changes
• MS Project; MS Office; Pivotal Tracker.
• Extensive project management experience.
• Ideally you will be security cleared.

Specific job advertisements for project managers such as this are not unusual.  But are the specifics helping or hindering a client find a top-quality PM?  What parts do these specific criteria actually play in the likely successful delivery of a project as compared to core project (intelligent) management skills?

Indeed from my own experience, when organisations get into difficulties and call in top-tier consultant PMs, these specifics are regularly discarded in favour of intelligent, experienced project managers who rarely meet these specifics.

So which view should we take?  We asked our own project management community about their views.

The pros and cons of experience

Prior experience of a sector and/or technology provides the potential for project managers to become more productive sooner than those without that knowledge, though not always.  Familiar challenges and risks are more readily identified; solution options may be repeated more quickly from past experience.  However, familiarity can create complacency; and possibly generating a previous solution, inappropriate for the current problem. 

At an organisational level, familiarity with stakeholders could be an asset as relationships are renewed much quicker, but only if there is professional respect between the parties; and that the stakeholder roles are similar to previous occasions.  Knowing and understanding the culture of an organisation also provides accelerated progress towards productive project management, provided things haven’t changed over the intervening period. 

In summary there are a number of advantages; however each of them have certain limitations precluding a wholly compelling argument.

The pros and cons of expertise

The first challenge of arriving ‘cold’ into an organisation is how to get up-to-speed quickly.  In theory this could take time; in practice, high calibre project managers learn quickly and adapt accordingly.  New challenges and risks have to be identified.  However, the newness of the environment prevents any complacency.

Building new relationships with stakeholders takes time and although there is no short cut, the way in which an individual conducts their business can rapidly engender confidence in lieu of a strong relationship.  Understanding the culture of an organisation has an advantage limited to the time taken to understand that culture – typically not very long.

In summary there are few disadvantages; only specific knowledge of ‘particular’ stakeholders (and even that on the assumption that their roles have remained constant) stands out as having any potential significance.

Experience or expertise?

Are there any significant differentiators that provide a compelling proposition to spend too much time finding, and then hiring project, managers with specific sector and/or technological experience. 

On the contrary, agility in hiring project managers appears to be based around core project (intelligent) management expertise with an ability and desire to learn quickly.  If you can find sector and/or technological experience as well – then that’s a bonus but it’s not a driving criterion for hiring...