What the Butler apparently didn’t see …
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My colleague, John Edmonds writes:
In a recent news article on the Contractor UK Network there was a call for Gordon Brown to “turn his back on traditional methods of IT project management such as PRINCE2”. The logic given in the article for this call was that public sector projects are failing to deliver, and that PRINCE2 was to blame.
Let me make my position clear immediately. I think that exactly the opposite is the truth – that projects are failing to deliver precisely because PRINCE2 is either not being used at all, or is being used incorrectly.
In the world of project management there is a derogatory term that is used to describe an organisation that claims the use of PRINCE2, but in reality fails to follow its key principles – ‘PINO’, PRINCE In Name Only!
Only last week I attended a meeting in Westminster to help set the scope for the PRINCE2 Refresh Project, a project that will ensure that PRINCE2 remains the de-facto standard for project management by keeping it up to date and relevant. At the meeting we were presented with the results of the last 6 months of research into the future of the method.
It was disturbing to hear reports of the ignorance of a few contributors - not people at the meeting, I stress - commenting so negatively on PRINCE2, where their comments clearly betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both what it really contains and how it should be used.
Our experience, as a company that has been involved with PRINCE2 since its genesis before its launch in 1996, is that organisations which understand the key principles of this project management method, and then determine to tailor the method in an intelligent and thoughtful way, do see successful project delivery.
In the last couple of years we have seen tremendous growth in the acceptance of and use of PRINCE2 throughout the world. Public and Private sector organisations in Europe, China, India, the United States and the Middle East will not have welcomed PRINCE2 so eagerly if it was an inflexible, expensive and ultimately failing method of delivering projects.
PRINCE2 gives us an excellent flexible governance and management structure; a superb product-based approach to planning enabling us to focus on measurable outcomes and a controlled environment that ensures that progress is tracked and managed on a stage by stage basis.
So my call to Gordon Brown is not to abandon this proven project management method, but to encourage and champion its intelligent use in all public sector projects, big and small. That is the real use of PRINCE2, not just the use of its name!
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