Essential process skills for IT

New technology skills are important, but having just technology skills will get you only so far. As IT gets more involved with massive projects such as corporate telephony systems, and with integrating new technologies that affect directly how business processes operate, project management and process skills are increasingly taking center stage.

"In IT today, just about everything is project work," says Kirsten Lora, a business training director at Global Knowledge. The exceptions are mundane, operational jobs such as backup." Concurs her colleague Walsh, "It's like a military campaign and requires tremendous project management skills."

Trainers recommended five key process-oriented certifications that career-minded IT staff should consider getting: PMP or CAPM, ITIL, CBAP, ISO 20000, and COBIT.

The Project Management Institute's Project Management Professional (PMP) credential requires three to five years of direct project management experience just to get in the door. For those who don't have the requisite experience, the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) is a good start, indicating that you have a fundamental knowledge of project management principals as defined by the PMI and can be a valuable contributor to a project team as a subject matter expert, liaison, or coordinator.

With companies struggling to run IT more like a service organization aligned to company business objectives, ITIL is the third key process-oriented certification to get. "For people looking at career paths, ITIL is where many IT organizations are headed," says Global Knowledge's Lora. She suggests starting with the foundation-level training to become familiar with ITIL principles and the organizational attitude involved. "If you're going to join a business that is using ITIL, you really have to understand the culture." Even if your business isn't doing ITIL, Lora says the training adds to your marketability if you're considering a career change. "We're seeing ITIL pop up in state government, hospitals, finance, systems integrators, the federal government, utilities, and so on."

The ability to effectively collect, define, and manage customer requirements are especially valuable skills in project management. "I've seen more deployments fail because people didn't know how to gather customer requirements," Walsh says. "You might roll out a new IP PBX with all kinds of cool new features, and then the customer says, 'Didn't you know we needed such and such features to handle customer transfers, etc.? They were on the old PBX. Bring it back.'"

A certification that is especially useful for gaining skills in gathering customer requirements is the International Institute of Business Analysts' Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP), Lora says. The CBAP requires five years of business analysis experience, but you can often get credit for many aspects of your IT project management.

Knowing how to measure risk and success effectively is also a process skill in demand. "For that, you're looking at ISO 20000 or COBIT training," Lora says. ISO 20000 is an international standard for delivery of IT services based on customer requirements, and COBIT is a set of best practices for IT management.

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