Tag: Management

The PRINCE2 Highlight Report and How to Make It Executive Friendly

PRINCE2 Highlight Report

The PRINCE2 Highlight Report is a form used to report the progress of a project to the Project Board. It analyses extra information gathered during project stages and identifies lessons learned. It is based on the Product-Based approach in the management of projects. It includes a list of the products in the current stage, issues, risks, and lessons learned.

Managing by stages

Managing by stages is an important part of PRINCE2 project management. It focuses on the way a project is planned and managed. It identifies the key decision points at each stage. These decision points must be addressed before the project is able to move forward.

PRINCE2 is based on the principle of breaking large tasks down into smaller, manageable chunks. Each stage is managed, monitored and controlled according to a methodology known as PRINCE2. PRINCE2 projects are managed by stages, separated by Decision Points and the Project Board.

Managing by stages is a key aspect of PRINCE2. The project manager should produce a Highlight Report for the Project Board on each stage to provide information about progress. These reports should be brief and easy to understand. The team manager may want to increase the frequency of these reports.

Including corrective actions in the report

The process of corrective action involves the solution of problems that have occurred. It involves the definition of the problem, the determination of its cause, and the steps needed to mitigate its immediate symptoms. This process should be managed to completion, with an effective debrief and lessons learned at the end. Corrective actions can be created using templates that make the process easy and efficient.

The corrective action plan must specify targeted timeframes for resolving any deficiencies. In some cases, it may also include special work that needs to be done to meet regulatory requirements. In any case, the corrective action plan should be based on the premise that it can only solve the problem if it can be rationally and within the project tolerance.

Including risk and issue registers in the report

The Risk & Issue Register is an important component of a project management process. It helps project managers plan for changes and to communicate these changes to the customer. Risks are identified and reported, and they are ranked by likelihood of occurrence, severity, and impact. Issues are events that happen during the course of a project, and they require management action. A project manager must consider the severity and impact of each issue and update the Risk & Issue Register as necessary.

Issues are related to change requests or other risks that affect the project. As a PRINCE2 project manager, you should be aware of the risks or issues that may affect your project. If you find an issue that is not within your project’s tolerance, you can bring it to the project board for discussion. If the issue or risk exceeds the project’s tolerance level, you should raise an Exception Report.

Making the report “executive friendly”

PRINCE2 Highlight Reports are an excellent way to provide a brief overview of a project’s progress and can be very useful to executive audiences. Most organizations expect all projects to include one, and most executives find these reports useful. Fortunately, there are ways to make the PRINCE2 Highlight Reports executive friendly without disrupting the project’s delivery.

For instance, when writing a Highlight Report, don’t include too many details unless it’s absolutely necessary. For instance, it’s not necessary to list every single decision made by project staff. Instead, focus on the highlights and key points that have been reached.

How to Become a PRINCE2 Certified Trainer

Becoming an Approved PRINCE2 Trainer and being sponsored by an Accredited Training Organization means that you can provide accredited PRINCE2 training. The market for PRINCE2 training courses is large and has also seen some impressive international growth. Tens of thousands of candidates around the world take the PRINCE2 Foundation and Practitioner exams each year, and large numbers of them prepare for those exams by completing PRINCE2 courses. The PRINCE2 project management method is suitable for running any project in any industry, thereby, making it a popular choice for a very wide range of organizations.

PRINCE2 Trainer Requirements

If you are aiming to qualify as an Approved PRINCE2 Trainer, you must meet the following requirements:

– A score of at least 66% in the PRINCE2 Practitioner exam
– At least 2 years’ experience of delivering training courses
– At least 2 years’ experience of project management (or having delivered at least 2 full PRINCE2 Foundation & Practitioner courses under the guidance of an existing Approved PRINCE2 Trainer)
– You also need to find an Accredited Training Organization (ATO) willing to sponsor you becoming an Approved PRINCE2 Trainer.

Before agreeing to sponsorship, the ATO will likely want to prove that you meet the above requirements. It is, therefore, a good idea to have your PRINCE2 Practitioner candidate number on hand, and mention your certification plans to current or former colleagues who could provide references, if required.

Training the PRINCE2 Trainer

After an ATO has agreed to sponsor you, you will complete a trainer sponsorship program (often called ‘PRINCE2 Train the Trainer’), which aims to help you develop and refine your PRINCE2 training skills. The program will likely include: giving presentations to existing trainers; conducting training sessions for delegates; familiarizing yourself with course materials and any relevant computer software required to deliver a PRINCE2 course; discussions with existing trainers concerning how to improve your training style, and so on. Such activities are designed to prepare you for a formal assessment, during which you will be required to demonstrate that you possess the ability to conduct successful PRINCE2 courses. As part of the formal assessment, you will be observed training delegates and will also be interviewed about your knowledge of the PRINCE2 methodology. The assessor will present his/her findings to you, and then produce a written report. Based upon your performance, the assessor will decide whether or not to recommend you being awarded Approved PRINCE2 Trainer certification.

Should you pass the assessment, you will be certified as an Approved PRINCE2 Trainer for 3 years, subject to yearly monitoring. Before the end of the certification period, you will be re-assessed in order to check whether or not you continue to conform to the standards expected of an Approved PRINCE2 Trainer. In addition, 3-5 years after you have passed the PRINCE2 Practitioner exam (and every 3-5 years subsequently), you will need to prove that your PRINCE2 knowledge is up-to-date by passing the PRINCE2 Re-registration exam with a score of at least 66%.

Enjoy Your PRINCE2 Training Career

While the role of an Approved PRINCE2 Trainer can be challenging, it also has the potential to be highly enjoyable and diverse. For example, you may have the opportunity to train in numerous locations, perhaps delivering PRINCE2 courses in Europe, Asia, Africa, or other regions. You will also have the satisfaction of knowing that your training equips people with a leading method of managing projects, which is designed to help organisations improve their ability to deliver successful projects on time, on budget, and on schedule in today’s competitive business world.
PRINCE2® is a registered trade mark of the Cabinet Office

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Organizational Project Management

The term Organizational Project Management (OPM) was coined by John Schlichter in May 1998 in a meeting of the Standards Committee of the Project Management Institute. OPM was defined as the execution of an organization’s strategies through projects by combining the systems of portfolio management, program management, and project management. This definition was approved by a team of hundreds of professionals from 35 countries and was published as part of PMI’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model standard in 2003 and updated later to a second edition in 2008 when it also became an ANSI standard. The standard was updated to a third edition in 2013. The term “Organizational Project Management” should be capitalized because the term is a conventional designation for exactly the systems of processes elaborated in ANSI/PMI 08-004-2008, because it is a proper name for that system and that system is definitive and regimented in its application, and because it does not denote generically any project management that is done in organizations.

According to PMI (2003, 2008, 2013)

Organizational Project Management is the systematic management of projects, programs, and portfolios in alignment with the achievement of strategic goals. The concept of organizational project management is based on the idea that there is a correlation between an organization’s capabilities in project management, program management, and portfolio management and the organization’s effectiveness in implementing strategy.

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Project Sponsorship

Project sponsorship is the ownership of projects on behalf of the client organization.

There are two main differences between project sponsorship and project management. Firstly project sponsorship includes the identification and definition of the project whereas project management is concerned with delivering a project that is already defined, if only quite loosely.
Secondly the project sponsor is responsible for the project’s business case and should not hesitate to recommend cancellation of the project if the business case no longer justifies the project.

Project sponsors can encourage separation of decision making responsibilities between project manager and project sponsor, accountability for the realisation of project benefits, oversight of the project management function and can carry out senior stakeholder management.

The project sponsor or executive sponsor needs a range of skill sets, or at least access to skill sets which include appreciation of corporate strategy; ability to prepare a business case and profound knowledge of the organization’s operations. The project sponsor also needs to know his or her way around the organization and command respect within it. The project sponsor and project manager should form an effective partnership with the project manager orchestrating all players involved in delivering the project e.g. designers, manufacturers and contractors, whilst the project sponsor coordinates all departments of the client organization and associated stakeholders so as to integrate the delivered project into the client organization and take full benefits from it such that the business case is fulfilled.

Because the project sponsor is the ‘owner’ of the project from conception to commissioning and operation it is particularly important to achieve continuity of sponsor throughout the project yet correspondingly difficult to achieve because of the extended duration of sponsorship compared to project management.

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Project Plan Document

The Project Management Plan Document also known as Project Plan Document or simply Project Plan is a document that contains the strategy for managing the project and the processes related to all areas of the project (scope, cost, schedule, quality, etc.) which are known as Knowledge Areas according to PMI. There are lots of project management processes mentioned in PMBOK® Guide, but determining what processes need to be used based on the needs of the project which is called Tailoring is part of developing the project management plan

The project plan document may include the following sections:

A High level overview of the project

The roles and authority of team members. It represents the executive summary of the Project Management Plan

The scope statement from the Project charter should be used as a starting point with more details about what the project includes and what it does not include (In-Scope and Out-Of-Scope)

A list of the project Milestones (the stop points that helps evaluating the progress of the project). This list includes the milestone name, a description about the milestone, and the date expected.

WBS which consists of Work Packages and WBS Dictionary, which defines these work packages, as well as Schedule Baseline, which is the reference point for managing project progress, are included here.

This section contains all management plans of all project aspects

Identify key resources needed for the project and their times and durations of need.

This section includes the budgeted total of each phase of the project and comments about the cost.

Acceptable levels of quality.

Some space for the project sponsor to sign off the document

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Project Stakeholder

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), the term project stakeholder refers to, “an individual, group, or organization, who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project” (Project Management Institute, 2013). ISO 21500 uses a similar definition.

Project stakeholders are entities that have an interest in a given project. These stakeholders may be inside or outside an organization which:

The following are examples of project stakeholders:

Rather than focusing on one subset of stakeholders, Lynda Bourne advocates prioritizing all stakeholders and focusing your attention on the “most important” at this point in time. Her view of importance encompasses an assessment of the power, proximity and urgency associated with each stakeholder. She calls her methodology a “Stakeholder Circle”.

The rationale for this emphasis on decision makers is part of project stakeholder management and a key component in affecting change in an organization. John Kotter describes stakeholder analysis and stakeholder management as essential components of change management.

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Project Management 2.0

Project Management 2.0 (sometimes mistakenly called Social Project Management) is one branch of evolution of project management practices, which was enabled by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Such applications include: blogs, wikis, collaborative software, etc. Because of Web 2.0 technologies, small distributed & virtual teams can work together much more efficiently by utilizing the new-generation, usually low or no-cost Web-based project management tools. These tools challenge the traditional view of the project manager, as Project Management 2.0 represents a dramatic increase in the ability for distributed teams’ collaboration.

While traditional project management structures focused on the paradigm of the project manager as controller, Project management 2.0 stresses the concept of distributed collaboration, and the project manager as a leader. Project management 2.0 advocates open communication. While traditional project management often was driven by formal reporting and hierarchical structures, project management 2.0 stresses the need for access to information for the whole team. This has led to one of the many criticisms of Project Management 2.0 – that it cannot scale to large projects. However, for distributed teams performing agile development, which are often emergent structures, the use of rich collaborative software may enable the development of collective intelligence

Common comparisons of traditional project management vs. project management 2.0 are listed in the table below.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

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Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The objectives of PPM are to determine the optimal resource mix for delivery and to schedule activities to best achieve an organization’s operational and financial goals, while honouring constraints imposed by customers, strategic objectives, or external real-world factors. The International standard defines the framework of the Project Portfolio Management

PPM provides program and project managers in large, program/project-driven organizations with the capabilities needed to manage the time, resources, skills, and budgets necessary to accomplish all interrelated tasks. It provides a framework for issue resolution and risk mitigation, as well as the centralized visibility to help planning and scheduling teams to identify the fastest, cheapest, or most suitable approach to deliver projects and programs. Portfolio Managers define Key Performance Indicators and the strategy for their portfolio .

Pipeline management involves steps to ensure that an adequate number of project proposals are generated and evaluated to determine whether (and how) a set of projects in the portfolio can be executed with finite development resources in a specified time. There are three major sub-components to pipeline management: ideation, work intake processes, and Phase-Gate reviews. Fundamental to pipeline management is the ability to align the decision-making process for estimating and selecting new capital investment projects with the strategic plan.

The focus on the efficient and effective deployment of an organization’s resources where and when they are needed. These can include financial resources, inventory, human resources, technical skills, production, and design. In addition to project-level resource allocation, users can also model ‘what-if’ resource scenarios, and extend this view across the portfolio.

The capture and prioritization of change requests that can include new requirements, features, functions, operational constraints, regulatory demands, and technical enhancements. PPM provides a central repository for these change requests and the ability to match available resources to evolving demand within the financial and operational constraints of individual projects.

With PPM, the Office of Finance can improve their accuracy for estimating and managing the financial resources of a project or group of projects. In addition, the value of projects can be demonstrated in relation to the strategic objectives and priorities of the organization through financial controls and to assess progress through earned value and other project financial techniques.

An analysis of the risk sensitivities residing within each project, as the basis for determining confidence levels across the portfolio. The integration of cost and schedule risk management with techniques for determining contingency and risk response plans, enable organizations to gain an objective view of project uncertainties.

In the early 2000s, many PPM vendors realized that project portfolio reporting services only addressed part of a wider need for PPM in the marketplace. Another more senior audience had emerged, sitting at management and executive levels above detailed work execution and schedule management, who required a greater focus on process improvement and ensuring the viability of the portfolio in line with overall strategic objectives. In addition, as the size, scope, complexity, and geographical spread of organizations’ project portfolios continued to grow, greater visibility was needed of project work across the enterprise, allied to improved resource utilization and capacity planning.

Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) is a top-down approach to managing all project-intensive work and resources across the enterprise. This contrasts with the traditional approach of combining manual processes, desktop project tools, and PPM applications for each project portfolio environment.

The PPM landscape is evolving rapidly as a result of the growing preference for managing multiple capital investment initiatives from a single, enterprise-wide system. This more centralized approach, and resulting ‘single version of the truth’ for project and project portfolio information, provides the transparency of performance needed by management to monitor progress versus the strategic plan.

The key aims of EPPM can be summarized as follows:

A key result of PPM is to decide which projects to fund in an optimal manner. Project Portfolio Optimization (PPO) is the effort to make the best decisions possible under these conditions.

Management System

A management system is a set of policies, processes and procedures used by an organization to ensure that it can fulfill the tasks required to achieve its objectives. These objectives cover many aspects of the organization’s operations (including financial success, safe operation, product quality, client relationships, legislative and regulatory conformance and worker management). For instance, an environmental management system enables organizations to improve their environmental performance and an occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) enables an organization to control its occupational health and safety risks, etc.

Many parts of the management system are common to a range of objectives, but others may be more specific.

A simplification of the main aspects of a management system is the 4-element “Plan, Do, Check, Act” approach. A complete management system covers every aspect of management and focuses on supporting the performance management to achieve the objectives. The management system should be subject to continuous improvement as the organization learns.

Elements may include:

Examples of management system standards include:

Management Process

Management process is a process of setting goals, planning and/or controlling the organizing and leading the execution of any type of activity, such as:

An organization’s senior management is responsible for carrying out its management process. However, this is not always the case for all management processes, for example, it is the responsibility of the project manager to carry out a project management process.

Planning, it determines the objectives, evaluate the different alternatives and choose the best

Organizing, define group’s functions, establish relationships and defining authority and responsibility

Staffing, recruitment or placement and selection or training takes place for the development of members in the firm

directing, is to give the Direction to the employees.