Does your organisation tend to hire specialist project/programme managers or generalist PMs? Personally I believe you need both.
The generalist PMs should be your core, the permanent members of a central delivery and change capability who know the people, the operating model, the customer proposition and the strategy inside and out. They have worked across different sectors, organisational types, local and global companies, leading various types of projects, from product development to pathway digitisation, asset change management to employee proposition improvement. These generalist PMs bring varied and essential experience to the team and can lead the majority of the project activity your organisation undertakes. Having a central capability that can offer such variability in projects is also be a great attraction point for new recruits who want to gain generalist experience, helping your organisation attract the best talent.
But there will be some programmes that need specialists, those that have repeatedly delivered a specific type of project, an expert in that field. In my experience this is when you are undertaking major functional transformations, an end-to-end financial process and system transformation for example. These specialist resource are more likely to be contract resource, brought in for that specific need.
The key lesson I have learnt is not to separate specialists out into the function that is undergoing the transformation, but instead integrate them into the generalist core team. They have expertise, experience and knowledge that the generalist PMs can learn from and vice-versa. Even better is to place generalist PMs within the specialist programme for a time, they can share their expertise of the organisation at the same time as gaining valuable experience in a new area.
Is your organisation leveraging the best from their project/programme management experience and expertise? How do they utilise generalist and specialist PMs?
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