For years I have been involved in trying to fill planning and scheduling positions for our clients, and am left with a few enduring questions as a result:
1. Is it really so hard to train and retain an in-house capability, such that this skill needs to be outsourced?
2. What is it about the scheduling discipline that makes it so hard to source these skills?
3. Where do these people come from, who actually fill these positions?
4. Where do they go once they leave the discipline, since there appears to be a never diminishing demand for them?
I have my own theories but I wanted to pulse the community to see what the true picture is, and what the answers to these questions might be, so that I can finally start to address this challenge in my own organisation.
To this end I have created a bit of a survey - see the link below - (a bit of a grandiose term for what it is, once you read it) which I hope to use to help me get to an answer.
I would be really grateful if you could give it a go and help me find an answer to my question of "where are all the schedulers at?"
Cheers and thanks,
Steve Grimmett
You are looking in the wrong place - the issue is not about schedulers, it's about management ignoring controls advice and/or preferring not to have any. Who wants a job where you have little impact - for most people controls is a step towards a more interesting management position.
It is a 'chicken and egg' problem but the solution has to come from the top. One symptom is professional credentials - out of the roughly 6000 people who earned their PMI-SP or PSP credentials in the last 10 years probably 30% have a qualification to allow them to act as an expert in court. The others are interests in controls - no one is seeking qualification because they need one to get a job.
If qualified and skilled project controllers were really valued by senior management there would be plenty of people seeking employment in the discipline - at the moment most people see controls as a software operator function with no real input to the management of the work, see: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Mag_Articles/P018_The_problem_with_CPM.pdf
Sorry Mike. Don't know what happened with the post. This all just seems a little clunky to me.
Try this:
https://s.surveyplanet.com/HJWBUHxBb
Hi Steve
Where is the link?
Best regards
Mike Testro