PRINCE2(TM) Practice Blog

Issue, Issue ... We All Fall Down

How much time do you spend dealing with issues? How much are you driven by your Inbox, your Issue Log, or whatever you are supposed to react to?

One warning light for most experienced auditors and consultants is if there is too much time being absorbed by reacting to events, rather than being proactive and heading off situations and relationships before they become a problem.

Easier said than done? Sure. But part of the personal challenge of developing as a project manager is to make this shift in focus and be ruthless about it. It can mean moving out of our comfort zone.

And yes, the Issue Log and meetings around it, can become a dangerously comfortable pattern of management for all of us.

So how much time do you spend in dealing with issues? Resolve to reduce it by a shift to more positive action.

Audit

Who's in Charge?

Driving home recently I was listening to a football discussion programme and one of the main topics was the current situation at Liverpool Football Club, where they appear to have a very confusing ownership/management/leadership structure which is causing all sort of conflict (take-over talks, joint owners not speaking, secretly interviewing prospective managers - it's a real soap opera). One commentator reminded us that Liverpool FC have done this before, when the tried the bizarre (and never repeated idea) of having two managers at the same time. Now I've used this as an example on training courses of how leadership is not something that can be shared between two or more people. Although there is the concept of dispersed leadership, that really relates to the need for a leadership team to display leadership qualities - it does not negate the need to have a (one) leader to be in position. Best practice methods at programme and project management levels recognise this and MSP suggest that the Senior Responsible Owner is clearly defined, while PRINCE2 gives us the Project Board Executive. Who's leading your programmes and projects?

PRINCE2 Training - the answer

If you want some training in PRINCE2 and you decide to let Google help you, my guess is that you will be more confused then ever. There is so much out there from the very good to the downright appalling. And that's just the quality of the training provider! You've then got to choose what type of course - duration, style, examined - you want. Worry no longer, help is at hand. My colleague, Patrick Mayfield, has produced an excellent guide to this subject, called "How do I choose a PRINCE2 Training Course?" This rather creatively named guide can be found via Patrick's blog or by emailing him at info@pearcemayfield.com It's good because it isn't 'salesy', simply an honest appraisal of how to go about a tricky task.

PRINCE? There are other flavours than vanilla

Yesterday I met with a client and we explored was was for me very familiar territory. His organisation had invested recently in some PRINCE2(tm) training and was looking for options to sustain this investment. I sensed he wanted to go beyond the confines of an exam-oriented programme.
Although accredited, exam-based PRINCE2 training has its merits - and from long experience I am one of its strongest advocates - it does have its limitations. Because it is exam-based, it means that delegates are coached in a somewhat purist application of PRINCE2, what we call "Vanilla PRINCE". The syllabus is designed to test a comprehensive, generic understanding of a Method documented in a fairly large book. Likewise an exam project scenario is designed with enough complexity and scale so that all aspects of PRINCE2 can be applied, and therefore examined.
However, for many generalist business managers this is far too much. It is overly complex. They need a much lower entry level to project management that empowers them to manage projects may never amount to more than $50,000 in budget, a few people in the team, and a few weeks to execute. For example, PRINCE2 says that you need a project board; but what if such a project only merits a single Project Sponsor? That suggestion would border on heresy to the PRINCE2 purist; at any rate, they would get a bit twitchy.
Large numbers of managers across the world are being trained in 'the Full Monty' of PRINCE2, on accredited exam-based courses. And they are being sent on such training because it is a known commodity of some repute.Yet, they may feel that they are being coached to pass an exam rather than being equipped with something that is immediately practicable and applicable.
In response to this we have developed other flavours of PRINCE2; non-accredited, but PRINCE2-compliant learning solutions for these kinds of people.

• Foundations of Project Management which integrates general skills with using Microsoft Project


• Practical Project Management, for a hands-on emphasis, learning by doing, and


• Complete Project Management for an immersion in comprehensive project management principles and techniques.

These are some of the solutions you can find on our company website. These may not be the PRINCE2 commodity exam-based courses organisations so often opt for, but they do equip people very often far better to deliver every day projects very successfully.

del.icio.us Tags: vanilla PRINCE,exam,PRINCE2training,project management

Technorati Tags: vanilla PRINCE,exam,PRINCE2training,project management

  Source: Lessons of a Learning Leader

Patterns in the first PRINCE2 processes

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
--Albert Einstein
Back in 1995, as the first PRINCE2 process design was drafted, we noticed some interesting patterns emerging. Initially the authors had designed separate processes for exception planning and routine end of stage management, both for the Project Manager. It was only when we began to review these two

that we realised that there was so much in common between the 'routine' end of stage preparations and handling an Exception Plan. Four of the five sub-processes in each were the same. So we merged the two processes into one. 
The result was the single, but dual-purpose process called Managing Stage Boundaries (SB). To mirror this we had to make the Project Board sub-process that interfaced with SB similarly dual-purpose. This became DP3 - Authorising a Stage or Exception Plan.

 So the Project Board would enact this decision-making sub-process either at a planned decision milestone (the end of the Stage) or at an extraordinary, unplanned point to decide on the Project Manager's proposal (Exception Plan) to recover the project from some serious certain deviation.
Further, we noticed another pattern. Very similar planning activities popping up in several places in the overall draft model. Again we saw an opportunity to bring these all together into one common, reusable Planning (PL) process. This process had to be based on generic principles of planning, but could now be invoked at several points in the project life cycle and at several levels of planning - project, stage and work package. The principles were the same, so why shouldn't the process design mirror this?
There is power in simplicity, when it comes to process design, and I believe the way PRINCE2 has stood the test since its launch in 1996 proves this.
Technorati Tags: project planning, processes, design, PRINCE2, Project Board, project management, stages, exception

An object lesson in PRINCE2 Practitioner Exam Success

There is quite a profound change happening in the next few days to the PRINCE2 Practitioner Exam. And we have had first hand experience of it.
My colleague Andrew Rock was leading a modular PRINCE2 Practitioner

course in Cardiff when APM Group contacted us asking if we would like to pilot the new-style exam paper. We put the question to Andrew who was just about to lead his class into the second and final module of the course, and so asking them, he went ahead. We had the results back and every single candidate passed! So well done, Andrew, and well done all our brave clients.
Until next week the Practitioner exam is a 3-hour written exam against three compulsory questions. Candidates have consistently complained about this handwriting challenge: who writes furiously by hand for three hours these days?
Also, there were two other criticisms leveled at this whole system:

1. It was always possible for an examiner to miss awarding legitimate marks (human error) or for one examiner to mark more harshly than another. I can attest to this, having been the first Lead Moderator of the PRINCE2 Exam Board.


2. Human marking took so long - it was difficult for one examiner to mark carefully more than 20 papers in a day and so the turnaround from sitting to the release of results sometime took up to 14 weeks - that even with detailed feedback from the examiner few people could remember what they had written!

Now, from next week, the PRINCE2 Examinations Board is introducing objectively marked papers. These will appear to candidates as a set of three booklets:

1. A scenario booklet describing a hitherto unseen project story or scenario against which the application questions would be asked.


2. A question booklet covering now most of the PRINCE2 curriculum, with multiple choice and matched part-type question structures.


3. A machine-readable answer booklet to be completed by the candidate in pencil. 


Turnaround from exam to release of results is expected to be shortened dramatically. In the case of Andrew's candidates this was two weeks.

We discussed this at our staff trainers' meeting earlier this week, and it was particularly pleasing since we had not altered our core Practitioner training course design at all.
We expect this style of exam to be much more popular globally, particularly within the USA, where professional assessments in project management have been much more towards multiple choice, rather than essay.
Note: the no change to the current Foundation Paper planned.
So we will be offering this new style Practitioner exam from now onwards.

Technorati Tags: PRINCE2, Practitioner, Exam, Examination, Objectively Marked, Blooms Taxonomy

[Source: Patrick Mayfield]

What the Butler apparently didn't see ...

My colleague, John Edmonds writes:

In a recent news article on the Contractor UK Network there was a call for Gordon Brown to  “turn his back on traditional methods of IT project management such as PRINCE2”. The logic given in the article for this call was that public sector projects are failing to deliver, and that PRINCE2 was to blame.
Let me make my position clear immediately. I think that exactly the opposite is the truth – that projects are failing to deliver precisely because PRINCE2 is either not being used at all, or is being used incorrectly.
In the world of project management there is a derogatory term that is used to describe an organisation that claims the use of PRINCE2, but in reality fails to follow its key principles – ‘PINO’, PRINCE In Name Only!
Only last week I attended a meeting in Westminster to help set the scope for the PRINCE2 Refresh Project, a project that will ensure that PRINCE2 remains the de-facto standard for project management by keeping it up to date and relevant. At the meeting we were presented with the results of the last 6 months of research into the future of the method.
It was disturbing to hear reports of the ignorance of a few contributors - not people at the meeting, I stress - commenting so negatively on PRINCE2, where their comments clearly betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both what it really contains and how it should be used.
Our experience, as a company that has been involved with PRINCE2 since its genesis before its launch in 1996, is that organisations which understand the key principles of this project management method, and then determine to tailor the method in an intelligent and thoughtful way, do see successful project delivery.
In the last couple of years we have seen tremendous growth in the acceptance of and use of PRINCE2 throughout the world. Public and Private sector organisations in Europe, China, India, the United States and the Middle East will not have welcomed PRINCE2 so eagerly if it was an inflexible, expensive and ultimately failing method of delivering projects.
PRINCE2 gives us an excellent flexible governance and management structure; a superb product-based approach to planning enabling us to focus on measurable outcomes and a controlled environment that ensures that progress is tracked and managed on a stage by stage basis.
So my call to Gordon Brown is not to abandon this proven project management method, but to encourage and champion its intelligent use in all public sector projects, big and small. That is the real use of PRINCE2, not just the use of its name!
Technorati Tags: PRINCE2, project management, practice, refresh

PRINCE2 Refresh: Re-Write is Underway

'PRINCE2 Refresh' is the title given to the latest project to redraft the PRINCE2 Project Management Guidance. We are looking at a fairly extensive project in this instance resulting in publication at the earliest towards the end of next year.
Since I was one of the four authors recently involved in the Refresh of OGC's companion Best Practice Guide on Programme Management - MSP - I was invited to a meeting in Westminster last Friday and advise on PRINCE2's alignment with MSP.
It was a very stimulating meeting, led by the leader of the authoring team, Andy Murray, who began by presenting back the various comments, and the patterns of comments and issues raised over the last few months by numerous different people. It's gratifying to see concepts and principles we wrote into the first edition that launched PRINCE2 in 1996 that have weathered pretty well over the last eleven years.
Yet I was appalled to hear reports of the ignorance of a minority of issue contributors - not people at the meeting, I stress - commenting so negatively on PRINCE2, where their comments clearly betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both what it really contains and how it should be used. (More on that in another post.) 
Once again, an NDA prevents me from saying too much more about the contents of the Refresh right now. As and when I can, I will keep you posted.
Technorati Tags: PRINCE2, Refresh, OGC, TSO

The PRINCE2 Practitioner Exam is NOT Dumbing Down

It seems that the PRINCE2 Exam Board is now pretty committed to a radical change in the Practitioner Exam. This will see the end of essay-type questions in favour of a 'multiple reasoning' – as my colleague, Andrew Rock, calls it – question book, where answers can be verified and have the potential to be marked by computer. Based upon Bloom's Taxonomy, a range of question structures will be applied to all the topic areas of PRINCE2 in the three hour exam. The question book will include one of several project scenarios, much shorter than the current Practitioner scenarios: that is, about two or three paragraphs. Further supplementary scenario information will be introduced at the start of question topic areas, where relevant. The Exam Board plans to release more scenarios than there are now. One surprise is that the new-style Practitioner paper will be open book: candidates will be able to refer to the PRINCE2 manual during the exam. The argument that appears to have carried the day is that PRINCE2 project managers would have the manual to refer to in practice anyway. When first proposed, many of us in the ATO (Accredited Training Organisation) community feared that this would lead to a 'dumbing down' of the Practitioner paper. The general consensus now appears to be a warm, but cautious, welcome for the new exam design. Far from dumbing down the Practitioner paper, it appears to many experienced PRINCE2 trainers that this is introducing a more challenging form of paper. When will this type of exam be introduced? Well, the Exam Board is currently consulting ATOs with a choice of between September 2007 and January 2008. My colleagues and I in pearcemayfield would opt for the later date, simply because of the clash with the launch of the new version of MSP. Our materials won't need reaccrediting by APM Group, but we are looking at adjusting the sorts of exercises we currently include, particularly later in our PRINCE2 for Practitioner programme; perhaps to make them more like the new-style questions. One of the most significant changes is that all areas of PRINCE2 will be examined in every paper. The level of detailed understanding of the PRINCE2 manual will be greater than in the case with the current paper. Also, the exam structure for MSP also likely to adopt this pproach.These sort of changes will be made to the MSP Intermediate Exam. The new-style MSP exam papers are expected to appear from September.

'Buddies' Help Achieve a Perfect PRINCE2 Foundation Score

Recently we announced the publication of our PRINCE2 Foundation e-learning solution in partnership with NETg. Well, Andrew Rock, one of the two trainers who worked on the narration to the product wrote:
I invigilated our first P2 Foundation exam, following on from our e-learning product, today at NETg’s offices, with NETg employees.  There was a 100% pass rate (9 out of 9)!!!  The lowest score was 45 and the highest was 63, followed closely by a 62 and a 60. 
What was also significant was that the class were confident that they could go straight into the exam without any further coaching.
Delegates recognised Andrew's voice from the e-learning and one delegate recalled
that:
I [Andrew] had put in one or two quirky phrases like

referencing that the Risk Log and Business Case are buddies that go everywhere together. 
I'm not surprised this helped. Such rich, and often ridiculous images, stick in the mind and are all the more memorable.
So the e-learning product is off to a great start and the delegates were pleased and in some cases surprised with their results.
Technorati tags: e-learning, PRINCE2, Foundation, Exam, Recall, Learning