Why the C-Suite Needs to Master Project Management
Why The C suite needs to master project management
I was explaining my day to day as the CEO of Cheetah Learning to a new team member and said – “basically I work on whatever is in most need of change at the time.”
Whenever something needs to change in business, that change often spawns at least one if not many projects.
There are many advantages to obtaining a PMP certification, take for example the movement of our servers to a cloud platform to improve up time and reduce operating expenses. We needed to change how we were hosting the back end of our website. I was hearing far too many issues relating to the performance of our website. Something needed to change and as the leader of the business i needed to initiate this change. Then I had to sponsor and support this new project. And track the performance to insure the team had the support it needed to accomplish one of our key competitive strategies – best friend customer service. After all the only way to consistently deliver this is to make sure people who count on us, can count on us – just like the dependability you get from your best friends.
I ask those of you who are leaders of your operations – if you stopped to consider the one category that would classify the gist of your day to day activity – what would you say?
If you are the main catalyst for activating the changes to get and keep your operation in peak performance, you may come to the same conclusion as I did. While you won’t necessarily be the person to do the work to implement the required change – when you know your role in making the change happen, you can make sure your team has what they need to play their roles more effectively.
Just like it’s valuable for corporate leadership to know strategic business skills taught in MBA programs, its also valuable to know the leadership required to implement projects that help the operation grow and morph. Those leadership skills are learned best by first becoming a Project Management Professional(PMP). Then make sure those on your team required to implement the changes also have the same requisite project management knowledge and insight as you.
This is why we are seeing more executives joining their project managers in becoming Project Management Professionals in Cheetah’s four day accelerated PMP program. Leaders who lead by example develop greater commitment with their teams for tackling the hard work of becoming a PMP. The entire operation benefits when the execs in the C-suite become PMP certified too.
“The first thing my boss said when I told him I was interested in getting my PMP certification was that if I was going to do it, he’d heard Cheetah Learning was the best.”