But between assessments, organisations can suffer a loss of focus on the things that need to be done to make project and programme delivery more efficient and effective.

The new assessment tool from Praxis Framework brings together capability maturity assessment, best practice checklists and a 360 degree approach that provides a comprehensive, real-time tool for improving project, programme and portfolio delivery.

The tool is integrated with the Praxis Framework and because its structure is consistent with PRINCE2® and the APM Body of Knowledge it also helps to assess compliance with the principles embedded in both of these well respected guides.

The questionnaires can be used individually as simple checklists of good practice or together as part of a 360 degree assessment of capability maturity consistent with the CMMI® levels, that involves project and programme managers, stakeholders and team members.

On-line guides explain the principles and uses of the tool are available at: http://www.praxisframework.org/help/capability-maturity-help-index

http://www.praxisframework.org/

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No registration is required and the glossary can be downloaded here.

The post New comparative glossary from Praxis appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

With Praxis Framework: An integrated guide to the management of projects, programmes and portfolios, author Adrian Dooley draws the best from recognised guides already available to create a single, integrated approach to the four key platforms of project management knowledge, methods, competency and capability maturity.

With many years’  experience in training and developing project managers and working with organisations wanting to improve their project delivery, Dooley recognised that there was considerable frustration and confusion over the variety of guides, tools and techniques all aimed at creating the ‘professional’ but using different language and terminology.  This created a professional jigsaw of pieces that didn’t fit together.

An Honorary Fellow of the Association for Project Management (APM), he was also the lead author on the recently published APM Body of Knowledge 6th Edition.

“I had long felt there was a need to harmonise, rationalise and integrate the principles contained in guides such as the APM Body of Knowledge, PRINCE2, ISO21500, MSP, MoP, P3M3, OPM3 and others.

“Working on the APM Body of Knowledge 6th Edition entailed bringing together disparate topics from many different contributors and make them speak with one voice and in one language. That was half the job of creating a common framework so I set about re-writing others in a common and consistent style,” he explained.

Because it draws from a variety of sources as well as those of APM, the contribution of Praxis Framework is recognised by the association as so significant it is publishing the hard copy version the interests of furthering professional discussion and debate and to complement its own range of qualifications, publications and memberships.

Writing in the foreword, the APM says: “As a way of reaching ever greater heights of success and meeting the needs of a complex and ever changing world, all professions aim to first define and then master their professional arena. This begins with a process of discussion and debate, to challenge existing norms and assumptions.

“The Praxis Framework aims to trigger just such a debate within the project management profession and will hopefully encourage more organisations to take a holistic approach to improving their capability maturity,  contributing to APM’s strategy for 2020 where ‘all projects succeed’.”

To purchase a copy of Praxis Framework please visit the APM website

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In case you didn’t know. Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ is a theory of motivation published by Abraham Maslow in 1943. It was never based on any empirical research and was, in effect, Maslow’s opinion from his own experience. Its popularity arises from the fact that it ‘feels right’ on an intuitive level. In effect, any ‘disproval’ of Maslow’s theory would be a disproval if his opinion – which doesn’t make sense.

But there is a bigger issue that this question touches upon. How should we regard the standard models of human behaviour that are frequently quoted in all management (not just project management) training?

If you have been on one of these courses, you may well have been introduced to Hersey and Blanchard (Situational Leadership), Tuckman (Teamwork) or Thomas-Kilmann (Conflict Management) to name but three.

There are a myriad of these models to describe many different aspects of human behaviour. Different models were, and continue, to be developed using varying degrees of empirical observation. No doubt some use statistics to validate their results but these are no ‘Standard Model’ in the mould of particle physics. No one will claim to have defined human behaviour to the 5-sigma degree of certainty required to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson.

All models of human behaviour are approximate theories. They are not taught because they are proven, they are taught because they make you think about people and the way they behave in a structured way.

These models should always be taught in a way that emphasises that they are ‘ideas’. There are conflicting and complementary ideas – all of which provide a framework to organise personal experience in a more efficient way.

So the next time someone teaches you about one of these models, see it for what it is – a starting point to try and understand how people behave, not a set of rules that people always adhere to.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will never be ‘proven’ and equally I don’t see how it could be ‘disproven’. But it does have enough intuitive sense to make you start thinking about motivation and, hopefully, make you want to learn more.

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The latest supporting product comes from PROJECT in a box who are delighted to announce the addition of a new methodology template to the set provided in all products from the free Community Edition through to the corporate Enterprise Edition. This new method template is developed to be in-line with the Praxis Framework, tailored for projects in a low complexity context.

The method template comes with a full set of document templates and extensive guidance links back to the comprehensive resources at the Praxis website. Tools are also provided for easy adoption of risk and issue management and for assembling plans/gantt charts.  This makes it a great entry for those new to project management as well as helping the more experienced teams to reduce the effort associated with the churn of project documentation and controls activities.

PROJECT in a box has over 200,000 users worldwide. Managing Director, Malcolm West said:

“We are delighted to be again leading the way in being the first to bring the Praxis Framework to market in an easy to adopt  and entirely free format. Praxis Framework is an incredible resource for organisations wanting to join up the pieces of their PPM jigsaw and we are glad to be able to minimise the effort associated with implementation.”

Adrian Dooley, creator of Praxis Framework said:

“The philosophy of Praxis Framework is that as much content and as many tools as possible should be made available to the project management community for free. This will promote the spread of good practice and break down some of the barriers to its implementation”

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Many good project and programme managers have a creative streak. They are constantly thinking of ways to manage their project or programme better. ‘Maybe we should run an event for some key stakeholders?’, ‘maybe I should move the assurance team to be closer to the developers?’

If you are like me, these ideas come flooding into your mind at the weekend when you are walking the dog or mowing the lawn. This builds into a tsunami of enthusiasm that hits your key team members on a Monday morning.

Some years ago, one of my colleagues just looked at me and said “In future, can you just write your ideas down and sit on them for a while, we’re still working on last week’s batch”.

A couple of weeks later I was running a workshop for the management team of a small but rapidly growing company that developed organic baby foods. The owner (an award winning entrepreneur) had invited me in to coach and mentor her management team because they needed better project management skills to implement her ideas.

This hard working and talented team dreaded Monday mornings. They would arrive at work to find their inbox full of bright ideas. The owner would spend the weekend in her kitchen dreaming up new recipes and emailing them across at 2am on a Sunday morning with suggestions (instructions?) to have the product “on Tesco’s shelves by Easter”.

I explained project management to the management team; I taught them techniques and processes and I fed back to the owner. Apparently the most valuable thing I’d recommended was for the owner to have an ideas log where ideas would sit for a week or two before being filtered through to the management team!

This may remind you of some of your key stakeholders and their attitude towards formal change control but don’t forget to look at yourself as well. Many of your ideas don’t naturally fall into formal documentation like change logs and risk registers. So on Monday morning, write them down in your daily log. Chances are, that when you revisit them on Wednesday you’ll think many of them weren’t such brilliant ideas after all.

Your team may love you for it!

The post Keep your ideas to yourself – for now appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

Take the ‘triple constraint’ for example. Its creation is usually attributed to Dr. Martin Barnes and the basic idea is that you can’t have everything you want. An idea that can be traced back at least another 150 years to John Ruskin when he said “The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – it can’t be done.”

The fact is that any project is a compromise between what you get, when you get it and how much you have to pay for it. Personally, I prefer the terms time, cost and scope because quality should be inherent in all aspects of a project – not something to be traded off against time and cost.

But this blog is not just about the third corner of a triangle, it’s something more fundamental than that.

Any P3M guide you pick up has a chapter on quality. Whether it be PRINCE2®, PMBoK® or any other ‘standard’, quality is dealt with as a function alongside time, cost, risk etc.

The one exception is ISO10006 which, ironically, is titled “Quality management systems – Guidelines for quality in project management” (two exceptions if you include www.praxisframework.org – but that owes its approach to the path set out by ISO10006).

So, the one standard that focuses primarily on quality is the one standard that does not have a chapter on quality. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Project management is about defining and producing outputs that are fit for purpose, i.e. it’s all about quality. Quality is not a separate function of project management – it is implicit in all functions.

‘Does this really matter?’ I hear you ask. I think it does because it influences the way we think. By making quality a separate function we mentally put it in a box, detached from managing time, cost, risk etc.

What we should really do is to put quality, in the forms of planning, control and assurance, at the heart of every function. That is the real route to achieving quality in project management.

The post Time to drop quality from project management appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

Each work package had an owner. This was typically an experienced Mechanical or Electrical Engineer who had shown good technical skills and was promoted to a managerial position. I had been invited to be part of a competency development programme for these managers.

This involved interviewing 250 managers to gauge their knowledge and skills. People were very willing to open up during these one to one chats and it soon became apparent that there was one specific issue that needed to be addressed – their use of Earned Value Management (EVM) as a project control tool.

Sometime previously, the Company Directors had implemented an EVM system and now received a monthly report on every work package. But as one interviewee confided “they shouldn’t be worrying about why three work packages have an SPI less than one, they should be asking why the other 25 are all at exactly 1.0”

The work package managers had quickly realised that if their SPI or CPI were less than 1.0, they had to spend time explaining why. This was something they didn’t really want to do, and the easiest thing to do was to make sure the indices were 1.0. They had all had extensive training in the mechanics of EVM, so a little creative interpretation was not a problem.

It fell to me to explain to the Board that understanding a scheduling technique is only 20% of the way to success – the other 80% is about changing behaviour. Unfortunately, they didn’t want to see the problem and were convinced the system was OK as it was (after all, it was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear).

All I can say is that some years later, the press was full of yet another failed defence project!

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I was invited into the office of a Director of a large, regulated infrastructure business. In the UK, companies regulated in this way are obliged to invest in the country’s infrastructure. The target amount of investment is agreed with the regulator and the company suffers penalties if it fails to meet that target. This particular Director was responsible for £500 million of capital works projects over the course of a year.

The purpose of the meeting was nominally to discuss the fact that he wanted us to conduct some Monte Carlo analysis training for his project managers. Naturally, I asked why he specifically wanted training in Monte Carlo analysis so he explained his problem:

All his project managers had been trained in basic risk analysis. Every project ran risk workshops and entered the results in their risk registers. Suitable responses were planned and risk budgets calculated – which then became part of the budget in the approved business case.

But of course, not all risks actually occur, so not all the money in the risk budget is needed. But of course, a project manager is reluctant to release money from their budget because they may need it for a rainy day.

From the overall regulated budget point of view, if money that was originally in the risk budget gets used to cover increased costs elsewhere, that’s not a problem because the money has been spent on improving infrastructure.

The problem in this case was where the money sat in the risk budgets of several projects and never got spent.

An audit in the October of this particular year had shown several millions of pounds sitting in risk budgets that were unlikely to get spent. By that time it was too late to get any new schemes underway with the cash that had been released.

The Director faced the prospect of having to explain to the regulator why the investment target had not been met.

His initial reaction was ‘our risk management isn’t good enough, we need more sophisticated techniques’.

After a lengthy conversation, we agreed that Monte Carlo training probably wouldn’t make much difference. What we ended up doing was running workshops that aimed to change behaviour and concentrated how risk management should be applied in the context of a regulated budget.

Successful application of any technique is 20% about the technique and 80% about the behaviour that applies it.

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With depressing regularity, someone in a magazine or a social media site will ask “What are the top reasons why projects fail?” Unsurprisingly, such surveys come up with the same old answers time after time.

The first example I ever found was from an IPMA conference in 1972, so we’ve been identifying the same reasons for at least 40 years. Looking at the history of some projects in antiquity I suspect it was the same 2,000 years ago.

The reason projects fail is for the same reason fad diets fail – it’s simple but not easy. The principle of losing weight is simple – the problem is that is isn’t easy. Temptation is all around and true weight loss requires long term life style change – not a quick fix.

Like losing weight, the principles of project management are simple – it’s just not easy when we want results yesterday that are top quality and don’t want to pay much for it.

Reasons, such as ‘poor sponsorship’ or ‘unrealistic expectations’ or ‘inadequate business requirements’ are not, in principle, difficult to get right if everyone (and I don’t just mean the project team) understand and agree what needs to be done. We just need to apply all those things they tell you about in the most basic of project management courses.

The problem is not that we don’t know how to manage projects effectively, it’s that the social environment often doesn’t allow us to do the right things. This is what often leads, for example, to an oft quoted reason for project failure – inadequate planning, because “if we did proper planning to estimate the real time and real cost we’d never get approval”.

Project management as a whole needs to take a more professional attitude and those outside of project management need to have greater respect for project teams who do the right things – even if it means they don’t hear what they wanted to.

Project management needs a change in social attitudes. What sort of people should we ask to manage change in organisations – project managers perhaps?

The post Projects fail for the same reasons fad diets fail – it’s simple but not easy! appeared first on Project Accelerator News.