Competency or Competence: Let’s talk

One of the most significant challenges facing a business today is to stay relevant and competitive in an ever-changing market. To be successful in the turbulence and disruptions of a competitive market place organisations must also be successful in their projects. This puts the onus on the project managers to deliver the value through successful projects. In the intervening years there has been a dramatic growth in the number of businesses employing project management as an important tool in achieving business outcomes or gaining a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the overall success rate of projects is still very poor as evidenced by the Chaos reports. This may be attributed to the selection of project managers who are a wrong fit for a certain type of project. There is growing recognition of the fact that hard skills such as technical or domain expertise may be essential in managing a project, it is the soft skills such as tacit knowledge of the organisational culture and clients that provide the most important contribution that a project manager brings to a project. The selection of a skilled project manager with recognized leadership competencies is becoming a critical determinant in the success of a project. To cater for this, industry organisations such as Project Management Institute (PMI) has developed the Project Management Competency Development Framework (PMCDF). The further development in this area has created a confusion between competence and competency. The aim of the paper is to add to the discussion and help understand the nature of confusion between the two terminologies.