New Research Underscores the Importance of Training Investments

The data is in ... and once again, training stands out as the number one thing organizations can do to boost their overall performance.

Our newest study, The State of Project Management 2020, both tracks trends in project management practice and strives to identify which practices make a difference to organizational success. It's not a new finding, because this tends to show up in study after study, but the correlation is especially strong this year that high-performing organizations provide far more training in more subjects than median or low-performing organizations. Not only that, but they also experience fewer serious challenges.

A few examples:

• High performing organizations are more than twice as likely as low performers to offer leadership training
• They are more than three times as likely to offer agile training
• They are more than four times as likely to offer advanced PM skills training, in topic areas like change management, benefits realization, and portfolio management.

When high and low performing organizations show this kind of disparate behavior, it's pretty clear that training accounts for a significant amount of the difference. But to confirm this, just look at the point spread in the challenges reported by high- and low-performers in the study:

• 71% of low performers cited "resistance to change" as a common challenge, vs. 39% of high performers
• 40% said their project managers lacked adequate skills ... but only 3% of high performers cited this challenge.
• 30% said their organization was unable to course-correct quickly; only 9% of high performers said the same.

Download a free copy of the research summary here; and if you have questions about the data, don't hesitate to reach out!