Prince2 : 2009 Release Date

It's official - the new Prince2:2009 material will be available from 16 June 2009.  At least, so says the lead author's blog and an e-mail from TSO which arrived days after the date was leaked elsewhere.  If you want to attend the launch in London you'll need an invite - I suspect that those that have participated in QA are likely to be on the guest list, but who knows.

After my experience with the ITIL v3 books I'm trying to decide whether I should wait a few months for the errata and next reprint before rushing out and getting the first edition or whether my curiosity about the changes will win out.  I suspect the latter...

Prince2 : 2009 Project Refresh

Although I've been following Andy Murray's blog on the Prince 2 Refresh Project, there hasn't really been much meat to it, in terms of understanding what this refresh really means for what we currently know as the Prince 2 project methodology.  According to his presentation (see link below) this was to protect crown copyright - okay... if you say so.  It seems now the time is right to reveal some of the content changes, and on the surface it sounds like a good thing.

In terms of structure there are now 7 Principles, 7 Themes (formerly components), and 7 Processes.

I like that they've gathered the principles that were scattered all over the book and reduced them down to 7 and that we can apply the test, 'Am I doing this? If not it isn't Prince2' to each.  Of the 7 (Business Justification, Roles & Responsibilities, Product Focus, Managed by Stages, Management of Risk, Scaling and Tailoring, and Learning Lessons) I find the latter a little curious.  Andy emphasised the need to learn from prior experience rather than simply identifying new lessons during a project and producing a report at the end.  It's not that I disagree with it - I just find it strange that it is important enough to be considered a 'principle'.

I'm pleased to see that 'Planning' has been removed as a single process and there is recognition that this goes on continuously throughout a project as well as major bouts of it at stage boundaries.  This is being addressed by including it as one of the 7 key themes (Business Case, Organisation, Plans, Risk, Progress, Quality, Issues & Changes) which all need to be continually present and reviewed throughout the project lifecycle.

We also wave goodbye to the 45 sub-processes (how I shall miss thee CS3...) and the 3 techniques (I never understood why these three were selected out of the many needed to run a successful project!).  Instead of sub-processes we will get un-coded activities and recommended actions.  In the case of techniques they rightly say they will refer to other Bodies of Knowledge, after all, why try to be all things to all people when other things exist?

Interestingly the number of management products has been cut from 36 to 25 based on what the authoring team consider to be a 'typical project'.  Andy didn't explain what this was so I am curious to find out.  What he did say was that we can scale up or down according to need.  Certainly when working with DSDM this will be scaling up!

It sounds like it's going in the right direction, it will be interesting to see how the pilots go and if they result in many alterations.  From my point of view I am particularly looking forward to the guidance for those directing a project as this is a real weak area.  All too often I see Project Board members who see their role as putting a name on a document for sign-off rather than having an active role and responsibilities.  Although as a project manager we can offer them guidance on what that should be - to have the fallback of Prince2:2009 Directing a Project guidance would be helpful.

Are you interested in the refresh? What's your take on it?

Source:

• Andy Murray's presentation of the project progress update at the International Congress for Project, Programme and Risk Management.
•  Copy of the slides for the presentation delivered above
• BCS article: Prince 2 exams set to be refreshed Q2: 2009
  

You're fired...You're hired! - Prince 2 style...

The Imp has been on adventures in another country and is now back, refreshed, and looking forward to what the remainder of 2008 holds. How fast it seems to be going!

If you are one of the many who have seen Alan Sugar's 'The Apprenice' and you have an interest in project management, you may appreciate this post. I read an amusing white paper published by FGI ltd entitled: '"You're fired": What The Apprentice Project Managers could learn from PRINCE2™'

The author takes us through a review of the series highlighting some of the tasks and how things could have been handled had the Prince 2 methodology been applied (in a very pragmatic way I might add). It leads to a rather interesting conclusion over who should really have been hired and who should have been fired. I won't give it away - read it for yourself (note - their Prince 2 resources website requires registration).

More on APMG and Accreditation

If you haven't already, stop by the ITSM portal today for some breaking news regarding the APMG and training accreditation.

Also read the article regarding a hypothetical impact that the UK government's transformational strategy when it comes to information sharing may have on ITIL and Prince 2.

And the answer is...

In our case we don't have the resources to go for a big bang (and nor would we want to). ITIL is very much about culture change, so it isn't going to happen overnight (more like years, especially in the public sector). Harnessing the support of everyone in IT will be fundamental to the success of the implementation.

To answer my question posed on Tuesday, the service support processes identified to help eliminate our pain areas are:

1. Service Level Management
2. Review maturity of current Service Desk Function and Incident Management
3. Change Management
4. Problem Management
5. Configuration Management

It may be that we can run change and configuration concurrently, I always think they are like the chicken and the egg. You don't want to implement Configuration management with change management otherwise you have no controls over the Configuration items; but if you implement Change with the configuration then you don't have the links to what are you changing... 'A person could go mad thinking about this... (10 points to the person who knows where that is from).

There are of course a lot of things involved from the people side with awareness training and workshops, to benchmarking existing processes, to consideration of the right tools to support those processes.

My intention is to manage the implementation as a 'Programme' of distinct projects, using Prince 2 Lite as the methodology. The high level plan has been drafted, let's see what the coming week holds...

For those of you in the UK - have a good bank holiday weekend!

Into the frying pan - My first 'major' project - part 3

A couple of weeks into the project I was told by the board that I was to use PrInCE2 Lite methodology to manage the project - and they wanted a PID. PrInCE2? A PID? What's are they when they're at home? I made haste to the office of our resident qualified practitioner who thankfully took pity on my ignorance and walked me towards the light.

A few hours later I emerged with a seriously high-level overview of Prince 2 (which I now knew was yet another wonderful acronym - PRojects IN Controlled Environments) and some standard templates all prepared to write the PID (i.e. Project Initiation Document a.k.a. PDS - Project Definition Statement).

When I say seriously high level I mean that I came out knowing what SU, IP, DP, CS, MP, SB, CP, and PL stood for and a rough idea of what was needed in each - and I mean rough! For those of you not familiar with Prince 2 it is pretty hefty and not something that can be learnt just like that. I am not qualified and rather keen to attend a course so I can get my head around it all!

Anyhow, once I delved into the template for the Project Initiation Document I cringed. There were yet more terms I didn't know, and sections that needed answers that I didn't yet have.

Thankfully you need not scour the web for such definitions as I have 2 links to recommend that will make quite the difference. The first is the Glossary of Terms (9 page PDF for download). The second is not exclusively Prince 2 but a truly excellent resource - Wideman Comparative Glossary of Project Management Terms v3.1.

In the next part of this saga, I will talk about the stakeholders and how I got their input (and in some cases how I failed to do so!).