Case Study: Training Doubles Success Rate for One Global Manufacturer

Thinking of making a major purchase? The wise thing to do is to thoroughly evaluate your potential investment. One way to do this is to see if someone else (or multiple someone-elses) got the product’s or service’s promised benefit.

To move this analogy into the world of business, let’s say that you are considering investing in a training program. The premise is that training your project and program staff will lead to greater initiative success. Have other organizations seen such success? Case studies can help shed light on this question.

The case studies documented here, sorted by initiative type and by industry, provide a resource for "shoppers" doing due diligence. For example, let's look at a case study that shows how investment in training and competency development doubled new initiatives’ success rate for one particular company.

In just 30 months, this customized project management training program improved milestone achievement tenfold. Besides that, raising the competency level of a program manager made it twice as likely that an initiative met all targets.

The case involved a consumer products manufacturer that has operations in dozens of countries. Its well-known brands are purchased by billions of consumers around the world. Program managers in the company’s innovation function owned the commercial, marketing, and technical aspects of initiatives. As former engineering and manufacturing project managers, they had strong technology skills—but lacked business skills.

Innovation program managers were now expected to be able to communicate issues and status directly with business unit general managers. This increased visibility called for stronger leadership and communication skills.

To achieve rapid results teaching business skills to innovation program leaders, the company tapped PM College to create a custom-tailored program incorporating two main courses:

• Initiative Leadership Essentials (ILE), targeted toward newly promoted or emerging program managers. PM College developed this course to increase knowledge and skills in key techniques that enabled them to be effective as innovation program leaders.
• Program Management Essentials, which built on and complemented the leadership skills of ILE by giving program managers the tools and techniques to plan, execute, and manage initiatives.

PM College also offered courses in project risk management, recovering troubled projects, leadership and communication in the project environment, and demonstrating courageous leadership.

As well, PM College worked with the innovation group to help focus their measurement efforts in order to understand how project management training and improved capability impacted project outcomes.

Over five years, nearly 1,500 participants took one or more of the courses at nine different sites around the world. The most significant outcome was a steady increase in the percentage of milestones achieved on schedule. The rate of milestone achievement was 10 times higher than it was five years previously.

Data showed that when the highest-priority initiatives in the portfolio were led by advanced program managers, those initiatives were twice as likely to meet business targets. This data made a powerful argument for continuing to invest in training in order to raise the competency level of program managers who lead high visibility, multi-billion-dollar initiatives for the company.

Learn more about this organization's strategy for success here. Do you have a training success story to share?