Tag: Quality

PRINCE2 Agile Training by Axelos

Axelos PRINCE2 Agile

PRINCE2 Agile is the world’s most complete agile project management method. It incorporates well-known agile techniques, concepts, and frameworks alongside the world’s most recognized project management framework.

It enables you to manage projects of any size and complexity on time, within budget, and to scope. This provides governance you can trust while empowering your people to deliver business value quickly.

Project Management

PRINCE2 Agile is an extension of the world’s most popular project management framework, offering a combination of Agile concepts with the structure and governance required to ensure success. This makes it a highly effective solution for organizations seeking to optimize their projects without sacrificing the quality of the results.

PRINCE2 has become a global standard because it provides clear guidance for managing projects of all sizes and scopes. It offers a set of processes and principles that ensure project success, including strong governance and strategic planning. It also helps managers understand the benefits of a project and correlate them with expenditures and costs. This allows them to prioritize projects and make the best decisions.

The Agile methodology emphasizes collaboration and communication, which can help with reducing costs and speeding up the project’s completion time. This is a benefit that many businesses can appreciate, especially in competitive industries where speedy delivery is vital.

Another advantage of PRINCE2 Agile is its ability to adapt to different environments. This is because it does not require a complete overhaul of the entire framework. The supplementary content focuses on the key areas of the Agile manifesto and offers tips for tailoring PRINCE2 to an Agile environment. This includes the use of user stories and defining what an Agile project is. It also encourages collaboration between teams and explains the importance of clear roles and responsibilities.

In addition to the traditional management products, PRINCE2 Agile has introduced a number of new tools for project managers, such as product-based planning and a quality review technique. It also recommends the use of Gantt charts, PERT charts, and critical path analysis. This is a useful way to visualize the project’s progress and monitor risks.

The Agile methodology also allows for faster benefit realization, as the project is completed in increments rather than in a single phase. This can be a significant benefit for companies that are looking to gain market share and can’t afford to wait for a finished product. The project’s completion will be much quicker without sacrificing the quality of the final result.

Product Development

PRINCE2 Agile is a project management framework that combines the responsiveness and flexibility of agile working practices with the governance of PRINCE2. Its purpose is to help organizations adopt agile ways of working without losing control or governance. It aims to ensure that projects are delivered in a controlled environment while still providing teams the freedom to deliver quality work on an iterative basis.

The main goal of the method is to enable product development through a series of stages, each of which contains one or more iterations (known as “timeboxes”). This allows teams to work faster while still maintaining full control over their projects and ensuring that the overall objectives of the project are met. The framework also defines responsibilities and roles clearly. It outlines the product delivery strategy, sets out the project objectives and risks, and creates detailed next-stage plans. The product delivery strategy is then updated on a stage-by-stage basis in line with new evidence.

Another benefit of this framework is that it encourages collaboration and communication between teams, even when they are working on different parts of the same product. This can result in shorter development cycles and more effective work. It also improves the quality of the final product and helps ensure that the company gets a good return on its investment.

In order to implement PRINCE2 Agile, the project team must be familiar with agile delivery methods. This means that the project team will already have a clear understanding of how to collaborate and communicate effectively. This makes it easier to implement the new method and can even save on training costs.

Project managers who have earned a PRINCE2 Agile Foundation certification are also more likely to have a greater awareness of the various benefits of agile methodologies. They may be able to offer more valuable insights when discussing agile with their employers and customers.

However, it’s important to note that the Foundation-level exam is not a prerequisite for the Practitioner-level exam. This means that anyone who has completed the Foundation exam can apply for the Practitioner-level exam. This is a big benefit for professionals who want to obtain a prestigious Axelos credential.

Change Management

PRINCE2 Agile combines elements of an adaptive development approach with the world’s most popular project management framework. It allows businesses to incorporate agile practices into their existing structures for streamlined operations and improved results.

Change management is an important aspect of any business, especially when a project is underway. It’s essential to ensure that all changes are reviewed and agreed upon before they happen. Changes can be a huge drain on a project’s budget and can lead to unexpected issues. The PRINCE2 Agile manual provides guidance on how to manage these changes. It covers topics like the quality review technique and the product based planning method. It also includes the roles and responsibilities of project managers in managing changes.

While most people associate PRINCE2 with traditional methods, the truth is that it can be used on agile projects. This is thanks to its adaptability and the fact that it focuses on the business justification of a project. This ensures that the project is funded and continues to have a business benefit. It also helps to keep projects on track by providing a clear understanding of what is required and when.

AXELOS’s PRINCE2 Agile manual describes how to use a number of different tools, including the quality review technique and Gantt charts. It also provides advice on how to use the critical path analysis. These are some of the most useful tools for monitoring a project’s progress and ensuring that it stays on track.

Another advantage of using a PRINCE2 Agile framework is that it simplifies the process of defining roles, responsibilities and lines of communication on a project development team. This can help reduce redundancies and errors. It also improves productivity and enables more efficient work.

In addition to facilitating collaboration, PRINCE2 Agile makes it easy to upskill staff in new techniques. This is because the majority of project managers already have a good understanding of the framework. This means that they will be familiar with the language and terminology and can quickly get up to speed on agile working processes. This can save time and money while helping to improve team efficiency.

Training

PRINCE2 Agile training is an ideal option for project managers looking to gain certification. This course combines the flexibility of Agile concepts with the world’s most popular approach to project management, and allows learners to understand how to tailor both methodologies for their own projects. The course also prepares you for the PRINCE2 Agile Foundation and Practitioner exams. Firebrand offers this course through their accelerated learning methodology, which includes expert-led instruction and a distraction-free environment.

During the accelerated course, you’ll cover the principles, themes, and processes of both methodologies. Then, you’ll learn how to apply the PRINCE2 principles to an agile context and assess the focus areas of a project in an agile way. You’ll also learn how to flex and fix the six aspects of a project, namely Time, Cost, Scope, Benefits, Quality, and Risk.

The accelerated training also covers the role of the project board, which is central to successful Agile projects. The project board must work well in tandem with the project manager to ensure that projects are aligned with business objectives. It must be clear what is fixed and what is flexible, and how the project will achieve its goals. This is achieved by using prioritization techniques such as MoSCoW and sprint backlogs.

Another aspect of the accelerated course is its coverage of the PRINCE2 Agile Hexagon Model. This model combines clarity and control with flexibility, and has six points of focus: ‘Time’ and ‘Cost’, which must be fixed; ‘Benefits’ and ‘Risk’, which may be flexible; and ‘Quality’ and ‘Scope’, which can be adjusted based on the project’s needs.

Moreover, the course also addresses the key Agile behaviors and methods, including Scrum, Lean Startup, and Kanban. This training aims to help you integrate PRINCE2 with Agile practices and ensure that your project meets customer expectations and delivers the required results. It also teaches you how to adapt PRINCE2 documentation to the Agile environment, and how to use Agile tools and techniques to deliver the best project outcomes.

Project Management Triangle

Prince2 Certification
Image by/from Catalin Bogdan (talk)

The Project Management Triangle (called also the Triple Constraint, Iron Triangle and “Project Triangle”) is a model of the constraints of project management. While its origins are unclear, it has been used since at least the 1950s. It contends that:

For example, a project can be completed faster by increasing budget or cutting scope. Similarly, increasing scope may require equivalent increases in budget and schedule. Cutting budget without adjusting schedule or scope will lead to lower quality.

In practice, however, trading between constraints is not always possible. For example, throwing money (and people) at a fully staffed project can slow it down. Moreover, in poorly run projects it is often impossible to improve budget, schedule or scope without adversely affecting quality.

The Project Management Triangle is used to analyze projects. It is often misused to define success as delivering the required scope, at a reasonable quality, within the established budget and schedule. The Project Management Triangle is considered insufficient as a model of project success because it omits crucial dimensions of success including impact on stakeholders, learning and user satisfaction.

The time constraint refers to the amount of time available to complete a project. The cost constraint refers to the budgeted amount available for the project. The scope constraint refers to what must be done to produce the project’s end result. These three constraints are often competing constraints: increased scope typically means increased time and increased cost, a tight time constraint could mean increased costs and reduced scope, and a tight budget could mean increased time and reduced scope.

The discipline of project management is about providing the tools and techniques that enable the project team (not just the project manager) to organize their work to meet these constraints.

Another approach to project management is to consider the three constraints as finance, time and human resources. If you need to finish a job in a shorter time, you can throw more people at the problem, which in turn will raise the cost of the project, unless by doing this task quicker we will reduce costs elsewhere in the project by an equal amount.

As a project management graphic aid, a triangle can show time, resources, and technical objective as the sides of a triangle, instead of the corners. John Storck, a former instructor of the American Management Association’s “Basic Project Management” course, used a pair of triangles called triangle outer and triangle inner to represent the concept that the intent of a project is to complete on or before the allowed time, on or under budget, and to meet or exceed the required scope. The distance between the inner and outer triangles illustrated the hedge or contingency for each of the three elements. Bias could be shown by the distance. His example of a project with a strong time bias was the Alaska pipeline which essentially had to be done on time no matter the cost. After years of development, oil flowed out the end of the pipe within four minutes of schedule. In this illustration, the time side of triangle inner was effectively on top of the triangle outer line. This was true of the technical objective line also. The cost line of triangle inner, however, was outside since the project ran significantly over budget.

James P. Lewis suggests that project scope represents the area of the triangle, and can be chosen as a variable to achieve project success. He calls this relationship PCTS (Performance, Cost, Time, Scope), and suggests that a project can pick any three.

The real value of the project triangle is to show the complexity that is present in any project. The plane area of the triangle represents the near infinite variations of priorities that could exist between the three competing values. By acknowledging the limitless variety, possible within the triangle, using this graphic aid can facilitate better project decisions and planning and ensure alignment among team members and the project owners.

The STR model is a mathematical model which views the “triangle model” as a graphic abstraction of the relationship:

Scope refers to complexity (which can also mean quality). Resources includes humans (workers), financial, and physical. Note that these values are not considered unbounded. For instance, if one baker can make a loaf of bread in an hour in an oven, that doesn’t mean ten bakers could make ten loaves in one hour in the same oven (Due to the oven capacity).

For analytical purposes, the time required to produce a deliverable is estimated using several techniques. One method is to identify tasks needed to produce the deliverables documented in a work breakdown structure or WBS. The work effort for each task is estimated and those estimates are rolled up into the final deliverable estimate.

The tasks are also prioritized, dependencies between tasks are identified, and this information is documented in a project schedule. The dependencies between the tasks can affect the length of the overall project (dependency constrained), as can the availability of resources (resource constrained). Time is different from all other resources and cost categories.

Using actual cost of previous, similar projects as the basis for estimating the cost of current project.

According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) the Project Time Management processes include:

Due to the complex nature of the ‘Time’ process group the project management credential PMI Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP) was created.

To develop an approximation of a project cost depends on several variables including: resources, work packages such as labor rates and mitigating or controlling influencing factors that create cost variances. Tools used in cost are, risk management, cost contingency, cost escalation, and indirect costs . But beyond this basic accounting approach to fixed and variable costs, the economic cost that must be considered includes worker skill and productivity which is calculated using various project cost estimate tools. This is important when companies hire temporary or contract employees or outsource work.

Project management software can be used to calculate the cost variances for a project.

Requirements specified to achieve the end result. The overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish. A major component of scope is the quality of the final product. The amount of time put into individual tasks determines the overall quality of the project. Some tasks may require a given amount of time to complete adequately, but given more time could be completed exceptionally. Over the course of a large project, quality can have a significant impact on time and cost (or vice versa).

Together, these three constraints have given rise to the phrase “On Time, On Spec, On Budget.” In this case, the term “scope” is substituted with “spec(ification).”

Traditionally the Project Constraint Model recognised three key constraints; “Cost”, “Time” and “Scope”. These constraints construct a triangle with geometric proportions illustrating the strong interdependent relationship between these factors. If there is a requirement to shift any one of these factors then at least one of the other factors must also be manipulated.

With mainstream acceptance of the Triangle Model, “Cost” and “Time” appear to be represented consistently. “Scope” however is often used interchangeably given the context of the triangle’s illustration or the perception of the respective project. Scope / Goal / Product / Deliverable / Quality are all relatively similar and generic variation examples of this, while the above suggestion of ‘People Resources’ offers a more specialised interpretation.

This widespread use of variations implies a level of ambiguity carried by the nuance of the third constraint term and of course a level of value in the flexibility of the Triangle Model. This ambiguity allows blurred focus between a project’s output and project’s process, with the example terms above having potentially different impetus in the two contexts. Both “Cost” and “Time” / “Delivery” represent the top level project’s inputs.

The ‘Project Diamond’ model engenders this blurred focus through the inclusion of “Scope” and “Quality” separately as the ‘third’ constraint. While there is merit in the addition of “Quality” as a key constraining factor, acknowledging the increasing maturity of project management, this model still lacks clarity between output and process. The Diamond Model does not capture the analogy of the strong interrelation between points of the triangles however.

PMBOK 4.0 offered an evolved model based on the triple constraint with 6 factors to be monitored and managed. This is illustrated as a 6 pointed Star that maintains the strength of the triangle analogy (two overlaid triangles), while at the same time represents the separation and relationship between project inputs/outputs factors on one triangle and the project processes factors on the other. The star variables are:

When considering the ambiguity of the third constraint and the suggestions of the “Project Diamond”; it is possible to consider instead the Goal or Product of the project as the third constraint, being made up of the sub factors “Scope” and “Quality”. In terms of a project’s output both “Scope” and “Quality” can be adjusted resulting in an overall manipulation of the Goal/Product. This interpretation includes the four key factors in the original triangle inputs/outputs form. This can even be incorporated into the PMBOK Star illustrating that “Quality” in particular may be monitored separately in terms of project outputs and process. Further to this suggestion, the use of term “Goal” may best represent change initiative outputs, while Product may best represent more tangible outputs.