Learning Leader

'Tis the Season for Giving

Below you will see me presenting a giant cheque this morning to Shirley Latimer, Deputy Manager (Shirley is in centre flanked by her colleagues) at our local Helen & Douglas House Charity shop.

I've never done this cheque presenting thing before, and to be honest it felt a bit awkward ... expecially since I always try to follow Jesus' teaching that when you give, you do it in secret (Matthew 6:1-4), not ostentatiously. 

But my colleagues ganged up on me again, and said it was for the good of Helen & Douglas House and, let's admit it, pearcemayfield. It's part of a policy we have adopted over the last few years of donating to charity instead of sending out Christmas cards to clients, partners and friends.

I'm really pleased we chose Helen & Douglas House this year. They do a tremendous work providing terminal and respite care for children, young people and their families. Children can stay at Helen House and young adults can stay at Douglas House, along with their families, for short periods of time for rest and recuperation, treatment of distressing symptoms, end of life care and support.

Please visit their website. Better still, make a donation to their fantastic work ... only maybe in a little less showy way than I did!

Traffic in India: a self-organising system

What happens when:

1. Everyone disobeys the formal 'rules'?
2. Everyone observes consistent values?

Answer: you get an unlikely emergent property.

I've just come back from a trip to India, where I was delivering a P3O course to a very agreeable and able group of consultants. (All passed with flying colours.) Since this was my first trip to this fantastic country I was, like most westerners, fascinated by the etiquette in the apparent chaos of traffic. It looks dangerous - and it probably is by our standards - but it seems to work. (See video below.)

'Respect' is a high value in India. Also, there is a pecking order, my driver told me:

• Lorries and buses
• Cars
• Rickshaws
• Motorcycles
• Pedestrians

There is a sort of precedence according your vehicle 'caste'.

Emergence and emergent property are concepts we try to illustrate in our changement management training. Now I have an excellent example from first hand experience.

Job vacancy: Salesperson

We have a vacancy here at pearcemayfield: a salesperson based at Wantage, Oxfordshire, UK, selling our world class business services and products in change through programmes and projects. If:

• you understand that last sentence    :)
• you have experience in selling, and
• you live nearby

this might be for you. If so, please contact us or call 01235 227254 for details. 

Please, no comments on this one, and no agencies - if you contact us we definitely won't be using you!

A passion for the subject

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to lead a three-day Principles of Change Management Foundation course. I very much enjoyed it.

Afterward my lead client sent me a very complimentary email including this comment:

    " I appreciated very much that there's a lot to put over and engage the group with and that 3 days is a long trek for a sole trainer..."

I appreciate the email. I am 57 (soon to turn 58), so I'm no spring chicken. However, there were four things that helped me call on sufficient energy to serve this excellent group: 

1. I'm keenly aware that my colleagues do this week in, week out, and to a very high and consistent standard. I am always mindful that I must not let the side down.
2. I do work out. That's important. I've learned I can't keep up high levels of energy unless I've built up reserves through physical exercise. By God's grace I'll continue to exercise; it improves the quality of my life, not just of my work, significantly.
3. I cared about the delegates this week. They are fine people, trying to forge good out of sometimes chaotic and brutalising forces of change. This change leadership stuff really matters, and can help them.
4. I love the subject. I believe in leaders shaping change. Best practice change leadership resonates with me ... and sometimes convicts me. It convicts me whenever I am teaching something and I realise that I haven't been living it in leading pearcemayfield; it make me want to go back and make amends, to lead better.

I thrilled that this course will shortly be upgraded to practitioner level. John Edmonds and Andrew Rock are working on taking this programme to a new level. If you are interested in being kept informed of this, let us know.

Timing Training

There's nothing more useless than gratuitous education.

My son, Robin, was a delegate last week on our PRINCE2 for Practitioners course. It was fascinating getting feedback from his whole experience. He found the course intense but rewarding; a sense-making of much of the chaos and jumble that made up his previous experience on projects.

Our conversation turned to his readiness for such training. Robin reflected that a few years ago he would simply have not brought enough reference points from his own experience to understand the relevance of much of PRINCE2.

To paraphrase the Bard - 'There is a tide in the affairs of men which, when trained at the ebb, leads on to fortune.' There is such a thing as premature training, gratuitous training, which is far less valuable, pointless even, than when training is timed to build upon some pertinent experience. 

Perhaps good training is like telling a joke well: its very much to do with timing.

Aftermath of the PRINCE2 Refresh Breakfast Briefings

On Tuesday we held the penultimate of our public Breakfast Briefings at Imperial College, London and had a very good turnout. One client emailed this unsolicited comment afterwards:

The breakfast briefing at Imperial was one of the best I’ve attended on Project Management due to the clarity of presentation and the gravitas of the speakers / representatives in the audience. Well done to everyone involved.

It's always nice when people generously and spontaneously give this kind of feedback.

Also we've had a response from this month's emailing to our clients and we have one corporate client request an in-house briefing. This will happen in September.

There is one public breakfast briefing left on our schedule - Oxford University Press, Oxford, on Tuesday 18th August - and you can still book places.

PRINCE2 Refresh: More signal, less noise

We had another successful Breakfast Briefing yesterday, this time hosted by our partners in the Lifelong Learning Unit at Cardiff University. There was a good number of people there and yet again delegates raised some interesting and novel observations.

For example, John was explaining the design approach to refreshing the PRINCE2 book, a work that literally hundreds of thousands of project managers have come to regard as a standard reference. He explained that he and the others in the authoring team had not just  reduced the number of pages, not just reduced the processes from eight to seven, removed the techniques chapters, reduced the components from eight to a series of seven themes, but also the theme titles were deliberately shorter:

During the discussion time that followed, one project manager felt that this keyed into common usage more directly and removed some of the 'noise' of the older version of PRINCE2. People more naturally talk about 'Quality' than 'Quality Management in a Project Environment'. The latter is no doubt more precise, but quite complex; and it does not exactly roll off the tongue.

Talking to this lady afterwards I realised that yet again, less is more, that too much noise reduces the clear signal.

I'm coming to the conclusion that this version has a better signal to noise ratio, as they say.

If you would like a copy of the new Managing Successful Projects using PRINCE2 or the Directing a Successful Project using PRINCE2, then come along to one of our two remaining Breakfast Briefings - Imperial College, London on ... July, and Oxford University Press, Oxford on ... August - where we will be selling copies with £10 off. To book your free place, just email our office or call +44(0)1234 227 252.

See you there!

Learning Lessons at the PRINCE2 Briefing at the British Council

At our second PRINCE2 Refresh Breakfast Briefing this morning, we found ourselves, thanks to our hosts in the British Council, in a beautiful conference room overlooking Admiralty Arch just off Trafalgar Square in Central London. There was a good turnout of knowledgeable people from a number of our client organisations. (One delegate even confessed to being a reader of this blog!)

One topic that prompted an interesting question from the floor was the principle of Learn from Experience. Where was the evidence that this was happening rather than just capturing 'lessons' and then moving on? John Edmonds confirmed that the new edition now calls the repository the 'Lessons Log' because until these are put into practice they are not learned. (It's obvious when you reflect on that for a moment.)

So imagine a situation in future where assurance people and auditors were to start with the PRINCE2 Principles. Might such folk look for evidence that the principles are being practised? How often has project assurance gone into spurious comparison with the detail of a method or standard when such details might not be relevant to the project in hand?

So in this case assurance would be looking for examples of where lessons earlier from the project or previous projects are informing and adjusting the management of this particular project. Wouldn't that be a better more mature way to confirm best practice?

uABC: (Un)acceptable Business Conduct

Just what is acceptable behaviour in business? In our work as consultants and trainers we come across a whole spectrum of cultures and what counts for 'normal' behaviour in organisations we work within.

Recently one of my sons gave me a DVD of the movie 'The Corporation'. ("The Corporation [DVD]" (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, Joel Baker)). The movie has been Released four years ago it has taken me a little while to catch up with this title, which I remember caused quite a stir at the time.

I suppose it falls into the Michael Moore genre of establishment-skeptic movie-length documentary. This work is about big business.

I found it to be well researched and produced, a worthy movie asking pertinent questions of our giants of globalisation, although it is somewhat selective in what it did present. At its heart is a thesis that if these global giants were human personalities then they would be psychopaths, behaving purely selfishly. And the way the movie develops this thesis is very clever, using an interesting presentation device: a behavioural profile that builds up the case during the first two-thirds of the movie.

It left me wondering why the company I belong to - albeit tiny by comparison with the subjects of this film - seems to express an entirely different personality, or so our clients tell us; a personality that unintentionally has built our brand, and a very positive one at that.

How did this happen?

I think the essential advantage of pearcemayfield is that we had a set of values established from the beginning, which we all live by consistently.

So what is acceptable behaviour in a business? In pearcemayfield our values drive the answer to that question in any context. They are our ABC of behaviour.

How was 2008 for you?

Looking back over the last twelve months, how has the world of programmes, project and change management played out for you? What were the

major events that had an impact upon you? What were the main lessons you gained that you take with you into the New Year? What trends have you seen emerging?

I've been asking myself these questions.

Programme Management

One of the salient trends I've seen in pearcemayfield this year has been the rise and rise of programme management. I find that this is particularly so as more people discover the power within the MSP framework. It seems to me that many of our client organisations have now 'got it'. If you belong to such an organisation, you have a clear understanding of the difference between programmes and projects, and you can see how programmes can power the performance of your organisation into the future.

So would I say 2008 is the year of programme management?

Not quite.

Business Change Management

I think we are seeing another emerging 'buzz', and this one is around change management. I see a new maturity of understanding, particularly within the traditional IT and project management communities. If you are an IT professional, for example, it is likely that you are no longer satisfied with delivering good outputs. Your own clients are demanding beneficial outcomes. You now appreciate that this is only achieved by well-led transitions, which you see evidenced by different behaviours in operatives.

I'm seeing a real surge in the popularity of our change management courses, to an extent that I've never witnessed before.

The 'Crib Sheet' Project

Then we touched a nerve.

Our own research into the 'mental crib sheets' of project and programme managers began. As we presented the early findings across different conferences and forums, I saw how the findings resonated with these different audiences. People told me things like, "This is the way I really work."

I find this poses difficult some questions for methodologies like PRINCE2. But I am encouraged that maybe we can find a way of coaching people into what really makes a high performance manager.

P3O(r) - the Missing Link?

Finally, I was a reluctant guinea pig trainer for a new OGC Guide on Portfolio, Programme and Project Office ('P3O'), and came away a raving convert. I have to say again, "This is good stuff."

I have found others we have been kicking around the portfolio, programme and project management space for a number of year, and perhaps, as I have, have set up project offices. This is for me the 'missing link', providing sensible 'joined-up thinking' for organisations of any size and maturity.

In fact, the P3O, whatever its incarnation in a particular organisation - and it can take many forms - can become a real powerhouse for effective change through programmes and projects.

So the, what has 2008 meant for me? Well, its not been a quiet year! But it has, for me, shown some very encouraging trends in the profession. How was it for you?

Business Change Manager, P3O, Portfolio Management, programme, programme management