Have you recently passed PRINCE and having difficulty gaining experience?
 
This can be a challenge, you want to manage a project and put your learning into practice, but until you have some experience the opportunities don’t come your way.
 
Some suggestions:
 
1. Try offering your services as project support, or, if you are friendly with a Board member, offer to help with their Assurance responsibilities.
2. Use your specialist skills in a Team Manager role for a small project, drafting out a Work Package for yourself.
3. Try implementing PRINCE in a personal project
 
Let’s explore 3. a little further.
 
Who would the Board be? The family? Much more challenging than work colleagues.
 
What would we do during Starting Up? Obviously the roles and team structure would be notional and is best kept to yourself, I doubt the family will understand.
 
Outline Business Case, should provide an interesting challenge, but no more than a Project Product Description. Lessons Log if you done this before, what about asking friends? Project Approach, doing the work yourself, or bringing in trades people?
 
Initiation, I would doubt you will get much benefit from attempting to write all 4 strategies, but a Communications Strategy with some stakeholder analysis may help. Prepare a PBS and Product Descriptions should give you some great experience.
 
Do the work and manage some Risks and Issues, then produce an End Project Report.

Why is this important? Because we all need to be good bosses if we want our people and teams to deliver the outputs.
 
Take a moment to think about the best boss you ever had. What was the main characteristic they displayed?
 
A recent survey showed the most important characteristic was, “left me to get on with the job and did not micro-manage”
 
This is, Manage by Exception, which is at the heart of all Best Practice guidance.
 
Be a better boss by agreeing clear tolerances for time, cost, quality (products), scope, risk and benefits.
 
Often Project Managers will complain that their Boards insist on regular progress meetings, and this is understandable for Board members who do not understand management by exception.
 
What can you do if the Board does insist on progress meetings?
 
1. Be careful, they will change their minds and add things to the project, so use the change process
2. Try to give them decisions to make, maybe to approve Requests for Change or help deal with Risks
3. You might even try to have a next stage plan for them to approve at each “progress” meeting
4. As the project progresses and they gain more confidence in your ability, cancel the odd meeting, might seem odd but they will thank you for it.
 

An exceptional project built the tallest building in the world.

Measuring a Project vs Operations
 
On a recent Prince course someone asked how they could measure their project with the recommended Time, Cost, Quality, Scope, Risks and Benefits.
 
It was called a project, but when we dug a little deeper, discovered that it wasn’t a project at all. So that lead to some discussion about it being a programme, but it was very clearly defined and MSP transformation style management didn’t fit either.
 
It turns out they were delivering a service, IT based, rolling one year contract delivering the same service to the public, year after year.
 
There are probably two ways to approach this, they could manage each year as a project. Starting Up each year, Initiating when the money was guaranteed, this has some merits and works well in some circumstances.
 
We agreed, eventually, that they would measure KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and the real goal was improvement in the delivery of the service.
 
Setting up the Service would have been their first project, measured with TCQ etc.
 
Running the service is measured with KPI’s which provides baseline measures for any performance improvement projects.
 
The Benefit Review Plan would show the current (baseline) system performance, and the PRINCE plans would show the changes to the service needed to move to a higher performance level.
 
Their final project would be shutting down the service and informing their clients.
 
Any other tips for this type of organisation?