Educating the next generation on project management
As mentioned in my first blog, my personal objective is to help the hospitality industry to transform itself and embrace project management as a strategic competence. One fundamental component of achieving this transformation is to educate future generations of hospitality managers and executives in the fundamentals of project management. As such, I revel in conducting guest lectures at hotel management schools to share experience-based knowledge on how to apply project management to new hotel openings.
I have always been amazed by the amount of effort, time and money the industry spends on training its managers and staff to maintain guest service operations and improve operational performance. In contrast, the industry appears to make minimal efforts to prepare hoteliers for the rigors of opening a new hotel and to systematically improve new hotel opening performance.
According to Lodging Econometrics, the global development pipeline stands at close to 13,000 hotel projects (or 2.16 million guestrooms), with a total of 6,000 hotels (or 1.13 million guestrooms) currently under construction. This suggests that over the next three years, five new hotels will transfer to operations per day!
To open (and operate) new hotels at this scale will require a massive talent pipeline across all phases of the new hotel project lifecycle. The current scale of upcoming transfers to operation implies that development and training of the corporate executives, pre-opening general managers and hotel management teams required to manage the new hotel opening processes in the pre-opening phase alone should be in full swing. Unfortunately, this appears not to be the case. There are a number of reasons for this lag, in my view.
First, there is a lack of synchronization of ambitious growth plans with development of capabilities to implement and execute. The development of a talent pipeline to open and operate new hotels on large(r) scale optimally commences three years prior to the start of exponential growth. This approach stands in contrast to the nature of hotel companies, where the focus is generally on quarterly earnings and annual objectives, and not on strategic objectives three years down the road.
Second, project management capabilities should be embedded in all opening-related processes and activities, across all project phases. Unfortunately, the hospitality industry lacks a project management culture. One of the issues is that senior leadership often views project management as a tactical tool to be applied when a new hotel project is already derailed (i.e., the proverbial Band-Aid), rather than as a strategic competency: “The ability to consistently, predictably deliver projects for strategic goals in an effective and efficient manner.”
Third, the hotel industry is not creating any demand from hospitality educational institutions. Subsequently hotel management schools generally do not see the need to make changes and additions to the curriculum. As mentioned, one of the fundamental components of the transformation is education, which could act as a change agent to integrate hospitality with project management discipline, to prepare for new hotel openings. At present, the number of hotel management schools that offer courses in project management can probably be counted on one hand.
I am happy to see that one of these schools is the School of Hotel Administration of Cornell University. Recently, I had the pleasure of conducting a number of guest lectures on hotel opening processes at the School of Hotel Administration. Their curriculum offers both introductory and advanced versions of project management to undergraduate and graduate-level students. And eCornell offers a course in project management for real estate development, as well as an excellent course on project leadership, accredited by the Project Management Institute.
At present, this important part of hospitality education is slowly taking root at other institutions on other continents. Although it has taken a number of years, we are very pleased with a number of high-profile “first steps.”
The first one is an industry partnership including Stenden University South Africa and the Project Management Institute, South Africa Chapter. The second one is a developing industry partnership including The Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management in Dubai and the Project Management Institute, U.A.E. Chapter.
The above is insufficient, of course, to meet the project management needs of the upcoming 12,000 hotel openings, but it is definitely a great start. The trend is in the right direction to help close the gap between the strategic needs and the talent pipeline, but obviously much more must be done in view of the scale of growth.
Happy hotel openings!
Gert Noordzy, founder and managing director, Northside Consulting, Macau S.A.R
This article was originally posted on hotelsmag.com
|
|
|
|
