Education

Review: Leading and managing the lean management process—Gene Fliedner

“Lean must be viewed as a framework of comprehensive, integral system consisting of four interdependent elements: leadership, culture, team and practices and tools.” Prabesh Aryal reviews Gene Fliedner’s book on lean management.

Wrapping PRINCE2 around Agile

Rapid changes in the business world has seen the emergence of Agile as a project management methodology, while PRINCE2 is becoming the world standard for practising project management. Roger Fance considers how these two can be combined.

Project schedules: the good, the bad, and the pretty

What makes for a quality project schedule? Martin Vaughan sifts through the good, the bad and the ‘pretty and colourful’ to find the perfect balance, and laments the lost art of project scheduling.

Wrapping PRINCE2 around Agile—Roger Fance

Wrapping PRINCE2 around Agile: You can, but should you?

Over the years, many organisations have invested heavily to increase the chances of project success by establishing project management frameworks, methodologies, processes, tools, templates and training to support their project managers and teams and improve project management maturity.

However, an ever increasing speed of change as a result of competition and technological innovation presents a serious challenge to business. It compels the need for continual re-evaluation of the project methods employed to ensure that organisations are responsive and adaptable enough not only to simply survive, but prosper. Some organisations have turned to Agile project management in an effort to improve their response to business change. In the right circumstances, Agile offers an effective way to rapidly react to change, indeed embrace change, through a range of management techniques. Some may be tempted to combine their original investment in traditional project management techniques like PRINCE2 with the benefits that Agile can bring.

This paper suggests two ways that PRINCE2 and Scrum as an Agile framework could be combined and compares the characteristics of each approach in relation to governance, planning, risk, change and value delivery. It poses some questions that organisations should consider before trying to combine these two approaches.

Author: Roger Fance
Review status: UXC Consulting

Coping with the peaks and troughs of consultancy

Responding to ebbs and flows in market demand presents a continuous challenge for consulting firms tasked with creating bespoke solutions for project delivery.

Project management certification tops IT salary list

The Project Management Professional (PMP) certification issued by the Project Management Institute (PMI) has topped the list of salaries for employees in the IT sector, according to a survey conducted by IT and business skills training company Global Knowledge.

Can we automate project governance?

Is it really possible to automate governance when implementing a project planning matrix system? Martin Vaughan discusses workflow versus high level decision-making.

“The business needs to make a decision as to the relative priority of the initiative, assuming it goes ahead. Priorities will always inspire debate and discussion.”

Project management tool review: Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook

The Acer Aspire S3 is the first of Intel’s Ultrabook range to come into the market. Ultrabook is the umbrella brand for Intel’s latest line of PC innards, characterised by Rapid Start, Smart Response, Smart Connect, Anti-Theft and Identity Protection technology.

Agile—beyond software projects

There is a pervading myth that the Agile methodology is only good for software projects. While the iterative style of Agile certainly makes it best suited to software development, there are plenty of other aspects of the methodology that make it a good candidate for projects in other industries.