[Editor’s Note: We continue our “Throwback Thursday” series with another look at a past entry on the skills needed for today’s procurement leaders.]

It’s a great and worthwhile pursuit for Chief Procurement Officers to invest in their people, so, in that vein, over the next few weeks we will be analyzing the key skills and capabilities (or higher-level competencies) that a procurement professional (and department) should have in place in order to execute successfully. We will be using Ardent Partners’ Procurement Staff Competency Matrix that we developed with our CPO audience. This competency matrix established industry-wide capability measures for the average procurement organization.

We hope this series will help professionals and their managers to better understand and communicate what the required capabilities are for specific job roles within the procurement department and thereby help identify, develop, and deploy the people with the right skills into the most suitable positions. Professionals can also use this series to better identify where current gaps exist in their organization or within their own skill sets so that they can take action to improve or move into roles with greater responsibility (and pay).

Today’s Competency: Project Management Skills

What are Project Management Skills?                                             

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), “Project management…is the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently. It’s a strategic competency for organizations, enabling them to tie project results to business goals — and thus, better compete in their markets.” Experts in the field typically list five standard project management processes. I’ll link those to how they relate to procurement in the bullets below:

• Initiation: more commonly referred to as “project kick off,” means getting all the project stakeholders together to discuss at a high level, the expectations and timelines for the project.
• Planning (or “project scoping”): Using sourcing as an example, a project team/leader should look at what stakeholders are involved in the project, what exactly must be sourced including quantity, specs, timing, etc. are just some of the typical planning questions that determine a sourcing project’s scope.
• Execution: here’s where the rubber meets the road for project managers – continuing with the sourcing example, the project team has to send out the RFP to suppliers, analyze results, award contracts and negotiate terms, execute contracts and communicate results.
• Monitor and Control: good project management ensures follow through by all stakeholders and in the time and manner consistent with the expectations laid out in the project plan at kick off. For a sourcing project, this means ensuring that all stakeholders understand the decisions that have been made and what they need to do to support them. Should things go awry in, say, a technology implementation project, the project manager will have seen the red flags and taken steps ahead of time to mitigate the issue.
• Project Completion: this is often as critical to winning repeat business as delivering on the initial engagement. Procurement needs to close the loop with all stakeholders and ensure that internal customers’ needs have been met, that exthe larger organization has benefited and that implementation teams know what to do next.

Importance to the Procurement Department

Procurement, like any function, has to run or support many different kinds of projects. To be a Best-in-Class business function, you have to be able to execute well, you have to be able to engage with stakeholders and suppliers, and you have to consistently hit your mark. Collectively, this means planning and executing projects that run on time and budget and deliver results. Procurement work and sourcing in particular is quite-often project based so procurement departments must utilize their project management skills and processes on a frequent basis. Project management is an inherent part of procurement, which is always trying to expand its influence within enterprises. At the end of the day, it’s much easier to retain influence than it is to win back after a poorly managed project. Thus, solid project management skills can help procurement departments build and maintain influence. If you think expanding procurement’s influence is important, then you area strong believer that having strong project management skills within the procurement department is critical to reaping greater rewards for the enterprise.

Importance to Career Advancement                                      

Just as project management skills are important to procurement departments, they are also critical to one’s career; there are multiple benefits. First, successfully managing procurement projects – or any kind of project, for that matter – helps your team and business succeed in fulfilling its mission. Second, consistently ensuring mission success should eventually translate into professional success in the usual forms – recommendations, raises, promotions, bonuses, and more responsibility. If it doesn’t in your current role, the skills you’ve acquired and leveraged are marketable and easily transferable to other project-oriented roles. You never know when your Plan B becomes your Plan A.

The CPO’s Grade

The “Project Management Skills” competency received a C+ from CPOs, which means that their staffs are a little better than average when it comes to general project management skills. To be clear, procurement professionals aren’t simply project managers, so we don’t expect them to have mastered the skill set. But successful procurement teams should have a firm grasp of these skills, and judging by how CPOs rated this competency, they – like an unfortunately high number of the other competencies in this “matrix” – haven’t mastered project management skills.

How to Improve

The good news is that general project management skills can be learned, honed, and mastered through a variety of channels. You can start by consulting with the project managers outside of procurement – whether they’re in content, product development, research or other business functions. They’re a wealth of free, in-house knowledge that you can use to expand your project management skill sets. If you feel that you need a more formal training experience, there are many in-person and online training and certificate programs offered at community colleges and university continuing education departments, such as the general Project Management Professional certification, and more specific certifications, like the PMI Risk Management Professional. Although it’s not directly related to procurement, your employer may be willing to sponsor outside training and certification, or reimburse you for the costs. Either way, it is a skill set that will serve you well in your career whether or not you remain in procurement. Of course, if you have mastered the 14 skills in our “Skills for the Modern Procurement Pro” series, you should stay in procurement because you are on the fast path to becoming a Chief Procurement Officer.

Tagged in: Chief Procurement Officer, CPO, People, Process, Procurement Competency Matrix