Managing Projects

Two years ago, CNA insurance companies (CNA) underwent a thorough assessment of its business processes and realized that small- and large-scale company projects were being approached in a variety of ways. Consequently, work was being done over, schedules were not being met, and there was no repeatable process in place to ensure success from one project to the next.

"Basically, there was a lot of good work being done, but the underpinnings of that work—the disciplines of managing time, cost and human resources—were not being implemented as effectively as we would have liked," explains Tom Hilgart, vice president of the learning group for CNA, a Chicago-based global insurance provider and the fourth largest commercial insurer in the United States.

At the time, the IT organization had begun to implement Business Framework, an operating model which aligns business and IT strategies, with a focus on disciplined software delivery. Within the Framework there is a dependency on the understanding and use of project management principles. "These skills were not prevalent within the IT organization, so we needed to establish a training program to build them," Hilgart says.

After a daunting RFP process in which several companies were evaluated—all of which used the industry standard PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) approach—CNA made its final selection in large part because of the vendor's approach to learning.

"While this particular vendor followed PMBOK pretty religiously," Hilgart says, "they did, in fact, offer a way for people to do more than just take part in an intellectual exercise. They were learning to work in teams to make decisions, applying the project management principles as they went through the courses."

Trainees were divided into working teams that competed on many fronts, including time and cost. Through the use of a computer simulation, they received fairly immediate feedback about decisions that they would make. "Consequently, they not only learned the abstraction," says Hilgart, "but they also learned that the guy next to them might want to make a different decision, even given the same information, and then they would have to figure out how to solve that."

This type of learning environment, in Hilgart's view, is ideal. "It creates a more sustainable outcome when people are able to leave the class with skill sets that include positive interaction with one another on an actual team, not just how to make a chart, how to plan this, or how to calculate that."

Prior to taking a more unified approach to developing project management skills, CNA sent employees to various local seminars as needed for enhancing project management skills. "The problem with that is that when you have different