Is Your Project Team Set Up for Success? Here’s How to Know
How a Core Competency Assessment Can Help Build Stronger Teams and More Successful Outcomes
When organizations struggle with poor project delivery or underwhelming adoption of new solutions, the root cause often isn’t the process. It’s the people.
This is true for organizations with a formal Project Management Office (PMO), a centralized team responsible for maintaining project standards, driving execution discipline, and aligning projects to strategic goals. It’s also true for organizations that rely on informal project leadership, where program managers, project managers, and change managers perform many of the same functions without the formal structure. In either case, the reason is the same: an initiative’s success comes down to the skills and capabilities of those managing it.
Regardless of your organizational setup, improving project delivery and adoption depends on strengthening the people who lead the work—and that starts by understanding their strengths, experience, and what the project requires. Taking a Core Competency Assessment is the first step.
What Is a Core Competency Assessment?
The Core Competency Assessment, powered by the Delta Technology Methodology, is a structured evaluation of the key individuals responsible for project delivery and change execution. This includes PMO leaders, program managers, project managers, and change managers. It assesses how well these individuals demonstrate the competencies proven to drive project and program success.
Delta Technology’s Core Competency Assessment provides a way to maps each team member’s capabilities against 30 core competencies identified by the Project Management Institute (PMI), the global authority on project excellence, as essential for effective PMO and project professionals, and enhanced with Delta Technology’s proprietary three-level proficiency framework. The assessment reveals, through its Core Competency Index output, the maturity level of these skills, which span strategic, tactical, and interpersonal capabilities, from stakeholder engagement and risk management to adaptability and strategic thinking. It also offers actionable insights to help your team develop to the standards required for project success.
Why You Should Consider a Core Competency Assessment
Strong project outcomes are rarely the result of luck. They’re the product of strong project leadership. Again, it’s the people.
Organizations with successful PMOs, or PMO-like functions, are often backed by individuals who consistently demonstrate the right mix of competencies across their delivery teams. When these competencies are missing, projects suffer from delays, misalignment, poor communication, and low adoption.
A Core Competency Assessment gives you a precise measurement of your team’s capabilities against where they should be, rather than leaving you to rely on the opinions or assumptions of a single person. It sets a baseline for where your team is today and helps you develop a roadmap to build the competencies that matter most to you now and for future projects. For example, your senior project managers should be proficient in most, if not all, the core competencies, and you’ll see if they are at, above, or below that bar. Your junior project managers, on the other hand, are likely still developing their skills and will be evaluated against a different benchmark.
The Core Competency Index reveals:
- Which individuals are best suited for strategic roles
- Where your team has untapped potential
- Which gaps are putting your initiatives at risk
- How to align talent development with your delivery goals
It’s a strategic, practical, and data-driven way to invest in your people and improve project performance across the board.
What to Expect and How to Start Your Core Competency Assessment
Whether you have an established PMO or want to improve how your teams deliver and support change, Delta Technology’s Core Competency Assessment can help you identify the right talent, focus your training investments, and build a more capable and confident project team.
Our Core Competency Assessment allows for a deeper, more actionable evaluation of individuals and teams. The result is a precise, unbiased view of strengths, gaps, and opportunities for development. We’ve designed our process to provide data and insight you can act on.
Each engagement includes:
- Detailed Results and Gap Analysis
Clear evaluation results for each individual assessed, plus a consolidated analysis of the organization or department as a whole. - Organizational or Department Improvement Roadmap
A strategic plan based on the assessment findings, which identifies key focus areas to elevate team performance. - Individual Improvement Roadmaps
Tailored development paths for each participant, outlining which competencies to strengthen and how to do so effectively. - Professional Review and Recommendations
A guided review of your results with our certified professionals, ensuring you understand the findings and next steps.
Delta Technology is PMO-certified and has over a decade of experience helping organizations optimize project delivery through both structural and people-focused improvements. We’ve worked with organizations of less than 100 employees all the way up to the Fortune 100, and helped take them from chaotic (little to no structure) or covered in red-tape (too much structure) situations to thoughtful and organized environments with just the right amount of structure to provide value to their businesses.
If you’re ready to set your team up for success, start by seeing them in a whole new way. To learn more about our Core Competency Assessment or working with Delta Technology, contact us.
For a limited time, Delta Technology will provide the assessment for FREE to qualifying organizations.