Brexit: a case study of MSP worst practice A year ago, I wrote that Brexit was heading for failure. I compared the Brexit programme to a rudderless ship, lost at sea. Brexit is a huge programme run by the UK government. The UK government is the home of “best practice” methods like Prince2 and MSP. […]
Brexit is failing to apply the basics of MSP programme management Brexit is heading for failure. This major programme is dominating British political and economic life and will continue to do so the several years. The British government gave us MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) but it is failing to apply MSP basics to the Brexit […]
Are you fed up with boring Project Management meetings? Are you in an interminable cycle of weekly meetings? Are you overdosed by tedious Powerpoints? It could be that you are suffering from “management by meeting”. If the only way that your company can manage a project is to hold weekly meetings with everyone round the […]
Do you know who said this? “I had six honest serving men. They taught me all I knew. Their names were: Where, What, When, Why, How and Who”? You probably don’t know – but you’ll recognise his name. It’s Rudyard Kipling, author of “The Jungle Book”, now famous as a Disney film. Rudyard Kipling’s saying […]
Should a project manager be a change manager? The traditional answer was YES, a project manager should know how to manage change. Today the answer is more often NO, as there are new and better ways to manage change. Change initiatives are increasingly using a new role of Business Change Manager to manage complex change. […]
Some project managers still like to use the old “rule of thumb” that a project shouldn’t last more than 9 months. This is project management folklore. If a project is longer than 9 months, says the old folklore, then it is likely to fail. So best split it into pieces. As with much folklore, this […]
In today’s fast moving world, most organisations have a large change agenda. Do you have more projects to run than people to run them? Are you forced to use inexperienced staff to run key projects? One response to this challenge is to look at best-practice frameworks like Prince2 for Project Management, or MSP for Programme […]
There is a growing understanding that Programme management is vital for big organisations. Methods like MSP are increasingly used by big organisations for major transformational programmes like • company mergers • business reengineering (e.g. ERP or CRM rollout) • launch of new products, services or markets • public sector reorganisation • major sporting events which […]
What is a ‘do-nothing vision’ in MSP? Managing Successful Programmes suggests that a programme team should elaborate a vision of the future. This is an agreed and communicated vision of the desired future. As a contrast to this desirable future vision, it can be useful to analyse the “do nothing” option. Your change programme may […]
Win-win with MSP in Madrid I’ve spent the week in Madrid training people from a telecoms company on Programme Management. The company has four types of people it needs to train. The training is based on MSP, the Programme Management framework from OGC. In broad terms, MSP targets transformational programmes. These deliver change. They change […]