Offering training is an often-overlooked task of a project management office (PMO). Ensuring you have the right skills within your project teams is very important to the successful delivery of projects and shouldn’t be overlooked.
Knowing that offering training is going to make your office a success, it’s time to look at how to manage training in your PMO. There are different ways you can manage the training and development of your team, and we’re going to explore:
How to gather and store your training requirements
Ways to track the training completed by your team
Different ways you can source your training needs
So you can get the training needs of your PMO organised.
How can I store all the training materials I need?
Up until a few short years ago, any training in your PMO would have been conducted face-to-face where needed, or at the very least, completed on paper. Now, training needs to harness new technology to remain relevant.
Having computer-based training means that everyone will get the exact information they need, with simple checks on progress along the way. The question is, how to store this information.
The three main choices you have are:
Storing training packages on your internal networks
Hosting your training on your company-owned servers
Adding your training courses to a cloud environment
Each has their own merits and challenges, which we will explore further.
What can I use to track the training offered by my PMO?
Once you’ve got your training online, you need to manage who has completed their training and schedule future courses. There are three main options that you can use to manage your PMO’s training needs.
Learning management systems
Learning management systems, or LMS, are a Software-as-a-Service that will host all your training content. This type of software will also:
Automate training admin needs
Plan when training can take place – most offer integrations or an API
Produce reports across a range of metrics
You’ll be able to track who has completed their training and identify skills gaps with profiles of everyone under your PMO easily available for analysis.
Employee training tracking systems
Less high-tech than an LMS, you can use a simpler tracking software that will update the details of who has completed what. They usually alert your when things like health and safety or data security training needs to be completed again.
You’ll be able to generate reports and some of the tracking processes are automated easier training management.
Excel tracking
Whether due to budget or personnel constraints, you may need to have a simpler training tracking system. A database created in-house will have the benefits of having the exact parameters that you need. However, they can be challenging to scale and you could end up doing the work again when you come to upgrade.
How do I source training for my PMO team?
Ensuring the training your PMO delivers is effective and engaging will drive results and enhance your employee retention rates. There are three ways you can source your training needs, and it’s perfectly fine to introduce a mix depending on your needs.
In-house training is delivered by your own staff and is targeted specifically at your business needs. It generally will only be valid internally.
Outsourced training is provided by a contractor and is useful for regulatory training to get the message right. Outsourced training can be rather generic and costly.
External training sends your team to colleges or provides online courses open to the public, which is useful for software upskilling for example. It can be cost effective and valuable to staff.
The take home
How to manage training in your PMO is task that needs to planned well. There are a range of options with varying technologies to support the delivery, tracking, and reporting of your training needs.
You will have different training needs, such as regulatory, skills-based, and personal development-led. These will need managing differently and you’ll also need how that training is going to be facilitated.
