Last week, an article at CIO brought up a topic of great value for project managers and anyone who is concerned with the culture and group process of an organization or a project. That topic is the notion of balance, and how to achieve it by compiling one’s personal knowledge about his own role and the roles of those working either above or below him.
The article suggests that the key components of balance should be leadership, methods, and culture. And it explains the ways in which an excess of one or the other of these elements can lead to insubordination, or an inability to adapt to new circumstances, or inconsistency in terms of when and how a project manager’s lead is followed by the rest of the team.
Click over to CIO if you want the details. But in any event, consider the ways in which online information technology training can prepare you to achieve a sense of balance in your firm or project, especially if you are working as a project manager yourself.
Among highly competitive firms like those we’re used to dealing with in California, PMP training is not alone sufficient to allow you to achieve that sense of balance. And while it doesn’t say it outright, it is clear that the CIO article means to lead readers toward that same conclusion. It points out, for instance, that “great project leaders are aware of the processes and tools available” and of how they should best be utilized to achieve defined goals.
That is to say, even if you find yourself on the fast track to a career as a project manager, it is probably not in your long-term interest to skip over the information technology training courses that your subordinates will have had to go through to fill roles working underneath you.
You will be better able to achieve balance among the different components of project management if you can draw on Agile training and ITIL training to actively negotiate the types of roles and responsibilities that your team members could fill in any given project. Similarly, if you have business analyst training under your belt, you will be more likely to have the analytical tools to recognize and implement circumstance-dependent changes as they are needed.
Of course it is generally true that the broader your range of knowledge, the more likely you are to be adaptable in any given field of human endeavor. But as we’ll try to emphasize regularly on this blog, the topics that you cover in an extensive program of online information technology training are uniquely interwoven, to such an extent that over the life of your career, you will frequently be surprised by the number of seemingly unrelated IT training courses you draw in as part of the same career role, be it project management or any of the many other paths you can take in this industry.