“It’s NOT Enough to Execute a Plan”
Fascinating job requirement received in my email:
….urgent Program Manager position…Client is really after large scale enterprise systems project management experience. They want someone with experience working in a PMO, but hands-on enough to build project plans. It’s not enough to just execute a plan, they have to know how to come up with a plan and then track the plan. Experience with PMO processes is highly desired. Candidate should have worked on long term projects.
Kind of interesting on several levels- required serious clean up of grammatical and spelling errors, plus the “not enough” statement which seems to have it’s priorities turned around. “Not enough to JUST execute a plan”; this is the hardest part and where we are most deficient in the project management arena. Although, when you think about it, a PMO should have VERY EXPERIENCED execution skills so they can properly mentor and speed up projects. This is not to say that the PMO performs the execution- it is to say that PMO’s role is to HELP accelerate projects through impartation of excellent project management execution skills. The statement “long term projects” is a red flag- this could indicate that they don’t know how to break up their projects into “doable” subprojects.
Amazing what we can learn from analyzing a recruiter’s job description. Tell me what you learned! Don’t be afraid to disagree or, better yet, twist this another way.
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4 opinions for “It’s NOT Enough to Execute a Plan”
Eric D. Brown
Jun 20, 2008 at 10:17 am
Definitely an interesting job description.
Perhaps what they are looking for is someone with some strategic thinking abilities rather than someone who just executes a plan that is created.
Maybe. :) There are much better ways to recruit for that position though. Like saying “looking for a Program Manager with abilities to think Strategically”, etc.
Bob Turek
Jun 20, 2008 at 11:25 am
Eric- thanks for commenting. After looking the job description over again I guess my objection is that it tries to hard, i.e., covers too much ground. We really need to separate what a PMO does and a program manager does and then zero in on what they really want. If I was interviewing for this I would want to understand what is missing in the organization- my sense is that there is virtually no PMO and they want the program managers to fill the gap by attempting to be PMO-like while they are trying to do their day jobs. Very hard to do. What do you think?
Eric D. Brown
Jun 20, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I agree with you. I think most job descriptions I see these days try way to hard to cover the job.
If organizations could better describe their job requirements, they’d be able to do a much better job hiring.
Bob Turek
Jun 20, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Eric- I think it has a lot to do with “too many cooks” (HR, recruiters, management). If companies would just let the hiring manager define what he or she needs things would be a lot simpler. It’s a culture thing- my industry, software, is very entreprenuerial and so tends to let the hiring manager do what they want. The funniest part of the job description was all of the spelling errors- I should have kept the original. It was hilarious. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Please do more.
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