Prudential - enhancing capability

To meet the business goals Prudential’s IT Division ‘PruTech’ needed to enhance the capability of their IT project managers, to support the increasing business pressure for consistent project delivery, at a faster pace.

Approach

The first step for one of the PM Competency Heads, Charles Stevens, was to understand the development needs of the community. This was done using CITI’s unique project manager profiling tool. Through a profile of the project managers’ competence, attitude and behaviours, skills and experience we were able to provide the information needed to advise Charles and other senior managers of the key development areas.

The major development areas turned out to be; stakeholder management, benefits management, quality and risk management. CITI created bespoke, highly focused, master classes to introduce practical techniques to the whole community and through this a consistent message was being developed. The PM community has also delivered a number of initiatives through its PM Focus Groups. These included an active mentoring programme, regular PM forums for encouraging networking and guest speakers.

The further step, which Charles felt was critical to the IT project managers’ sense of professionalism, was to gain accreditation. This was kicked off by putting 20 individuals through the Association for Project Management’s APMP accreditation on a pilot basis.

CITI provided its distance learning programme APMP Pathway, which was supported by a CITI mentor. This gave the project managers a very flexible study programme so they could meet their project deadlines while preparing for their exams.

Outcome

The group had an astounding 95% pass rate – a real achievement and a reflection of the commitment from the Prutech’s project managers.

The PruTech management team and CITI are continuing to develop the capability of the project management community; further groups of APMP candidates are going through their accreditation as well as a number of master classes have been scheduled every year. Charles Stevens summarises: “I can now say that we have a PM community which has a greater level of capability as well as a strong sense of identity which encourages support within its community which was recently evidenced in Prudential’s/ PruTech’s attainment of CMMI level 2.”