If you are new to project management, or want to improve your project management skills, PRINCE2 Training Courses is for you. PRINCE2 is a project management method that covers the organization and management of projects.

This article will define project management; briefly discuss the history of PRINCE2, what is involved in PRINCE2 Training courses, and how it will benefit both you and your company.

Project management is the process of planning, organizing, staffing, giving direction, and controlling the production of a system using knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques. A structured project management method is the written description of a logical and organized approach, and PRINCE2 is a structured project management method that can be tailored for use on any type or size of project.

PRINCE (Projects IN Controlled Environments) was established in 1989 by CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency), now renamed the OGC (Office of Government Commerce). Prince was later developed into PRINCE2 by a group of project management specialists. Over 150 public and private sector organisations were involved in reviewing the quality of the method as it was produced, and it was released in October 1996. PRINCE2 is seen as the generic, best practice approach to meet the needs of business. It is widely used in the public and private sector and is the ‘de-facto’ standard for project management within the UK and internationally. With such an impressive history, it is no wonder that PRINCE2 training courses are in demand.

PRINCE2 training explains the series of processes that cover all the activities needed for a project from the beginning to the end. The training focuses on business justification and demonstrates how its flexibility is applied to any project. It gives a defined organization structure for the project management team, and shows how a structured management project should operate with an organized and controlled start, middle and end.

If you haven’t had any PRINCE2 training there are two options – first option is the PRINCE2 Foundation training course. Second option is the PRINCE2 Foundation training course in conjunction with PRINCE2 Practitioner training course that allows you to become a fully qualified PRINCE2 Practitioner. The PRINCE2 Foundation training course aims to provide you with a comprehensive introduction to PRINCE2 and to prepare you for the PRINCE2 Foundation Certificate examination. The course objectives include:

- To recognize the factors that enable successful projects to be delivered on time, within budget and according to expectations.

- Describe the PRINCE2 components, processes, and techniques.

- Recognize and use the main PRINCE2 terminology.

- Prepare for and take the PRINCE2 Foundation Certificate Examination.

The benefits of undertaking PRINCE2 Foundation training is being able to understand a structured approach to project management; enhance your CV and increase your career prospects.

The PRINCE2 Practitioner training course enables you to become a qualified PRINCE2 Practitioner. The PRINCE2 Practitioner course covers the processes, components, and techniques included in the PRINCE2 Project Management Method. The course prepares you for the APM Group examinations, and includes instructor led tuition, individual exercises, and case studies. The course objectives include:

- How to tailor the PRINCE2 method to different projects.
- Identify the terminology used in PRINCE2.
- Apply PRINCE2 to a given scenario.
- Prepare for and sit the PRINCE2 Practitioner examination.

The benefits of undertaking PRINCE2 Practitioner course will boost your confidence in managing or participating in projects, gain experience of the main PRINCE2 techniques, and become a PRINCE2 Registered Practitioner, which in turn will boost your career prospects.

In conclusion, PRINCE2 is excellent for people who are involved with project management, and individuals who have taken a PRINCE2 training course have said how valuable the training has been for themselves and their organization.

Managing your website development need not cause you sleepless nights providing you learn the secrets of successful project management. Perform the best practices in project management and give your project the best chance of success.

Define objectives

Objectives guide everyone on the project to your final goals. Are your objectives to sell your product online, to provide customer support, to promote investor relations? Carefully decide and clearly document your objectives.

Decide the critical success factors ?the things at the end of the project which tell you if you’ve been successful. Make them measurable so you know if you’ve achieved them. For example, the website development should result in an increase in online sales of 25% by year end.

Stakeholder analysis

A stakeholder is someone with an interest in your project’s success (or failure). Decide who they are and whether they support your project. Perform stakeholder analysis by classifying them (high or low) according to how motivated they are in helping (or blocking) your project and how influential (high or low) they are.

Highly influential and supportive people are your allies. Gain their support whenever you can. Aim to reduce the influence of people who are both highly influential and against your project as these people could act to damage your project.

During your stakeholder analysis, draw up strategies for dealing with each group of stakeholders.

Define deliverables

Deliverables are tangible things produced during the project. Talk with key stakeholders to help define deliverables. Will your website design include web page layouts and sitemap for use by the programming team? What is the content for each page? Write all this down.

Key stakeholders must review and agree the deliverables accurately reflect what they expect to be delivered.

Project planning

Define how you will arrive at your objectives. This involves planning how many people, resources and budget are required. If delivering this in house, decide what activities are required to produce each deliverable.

For example, you might decide a web designer will develop page layouts and navigation diagrams. You might decide the marketing team will supply all product details and photographs. You might decide the finance manager will set up merchant and payment gateway accounts to enable e-commerce transactions via your website. If outsourcing work, specify exactly what the sub-contractor should deliver.

Estimate the time and effort required for each activity and decide realistic schedules and budget. Ensure key stakeholders review and agree the plan and budget.

Communication planning

Hold a kick off meeting with the team and explain the plan. Ensure everyone knows exactly what the schedule is, and what is expected of them.

For example, the web designer needs to know that he is to produce page layouts and navigation diagrams based upon the marketing manager’s requirements. He needs to know his expected start and end times.

Share your project communication plan with the team. This should include details of report templates, frequency of reporting and meetings, and details of how conflicts between teams and their members will be resolved.

Project tracking

Constant monitoring of variations between actual and planned cost, schedule and scope is required. Report variations to key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations occur. To get a project back on track you will need to juggle cost, scope and schedule.

Suppose your programmer hits technical problems which threaten to delay the project. You might recover time by re-organising or shortening remaining tasks. If that’s not possible, you might consider increasing the budget to employ an additional programmer, or consider reducing the scope in other areas.

Be aware that any adjustments you make to the plan might affect the quality of deliverables. If you need to increase the budget, seek approval from the project sponsor.

Change management

Once started, all projects change. Decide a simple change strategy with key stakeholders. This could be a committee which decides to accept or reject changes which comprises of you and one or more key stakeholders.

Assess the impact of each change on scope, cost and schedule. Decide to accept or reject the change. Be aware that the more changes you accept the less chance you have of completing the project on time and within budget unless you reduce scope in other areas.

Suppose the marketing manager wants to add a popup window to display full size photographs of products. Assess the impact of this change. You might need to remove some remaining tasks to include this change and stay within budget. Or, it might be impossible to include the change without increasing the budget or schedule.

Don’t blindly accept changes without assessing the impact or your project will overrun.

Risk management

Risks are events which can adversely affect the success of the project. Identify risks to a project early. Decide if each risk is likely or unlikely to occur. Decide if its impact on the project is high or low.

Risks that are likely to occur and have high impact are the severest risks. High impact but unlikely risks, or low impact but likely risks pose a medium threat. Unlikely and low impact risks pose the least threat.

Create a mitigation plan of the actions necessary to reduce the impact if the risk occurs. Start with the severest risks first, then deal with the medium risks. Regularly review risks. Add new ones if they occur.

Suppose the marketing manager cannot decide what he wants from the website. Without knowing what the marketing manager wants, the team cannot deliver a website to meet his expectations. You assess this risk as highly likely to occur and having high impact. Your mitigation plan might be that the web designer develops page layouts to be reviewed by the manager early in the project.

Summary

Performing best practices in project management will give your website development project the best chance of success.

A Project Manager is the person responsible for the overall success of the project.

What does a Project Manager do?

Having received the Project Mandate (detailing the reason for the project and the expected outcome) from Corporate/Programme Management, it is the Project Manager’s job to:

• Decide how the expected outcome can best be achieved
• Draw up a Business Case justifying the proposal
• Create a Project Plan, including expected budget, timescale and necessary resources
• Build a Project Team and ensure that each member of the team understands and can perform expected project tasks
• Monitor project progress, control deviation from Project Plan and provide the Project Board and Stakeholders with regular updates
• Anticipate risks and assess the impact of proposed changes
• Overcome day-to-day challenges
• Deliver the final product to the budget, timescale and quality agreed with the Customer at the beginning

What skills does a Project Manager require?

• Organisation: project managers are the people who make sure that everybody else is organised, so self-organisation is an essential skill.

If you are the kind of person who lists everything down to the number of potatoes you put on your shopping-list, then Project Management is definitely for you. If not, then you need to learn project management organisational skills – and fast.

• Communication: as the project manager, you will be responsible for ensuring that everybody knows what is going on and what they are supposed to do.

Are you a good communicator on every level? Can you explain the basics of the project need to the most junior team member, and the next moment chair a meeting with senior representatives from your customers and suppliers?

Learning to be a communicative Project Manager doesn’t mean that you have to be a natural talker or have the acting skills of Laurence Olivier – it is far more important that you are aware of your communication responsibilities (who needs to know what), that you have confidence in your project management decisions and that you explain these decisions and their implications clearly and concisely to all the relevant people.

• Leadership: not project management, but people management

It may seem contradictory, but the most important part of the Project Managers job is not managing the project, but managing people.

It is the Project Team who will get your project done. With a set of well-trained, motivated and carefully instructed individuals, you will be able to assume the role of conductor, rather than nanny.

An excellent Project Management leader is somebody who knows how to set objectives not tasks, how to inspire staff with vision not fear and how to deliver accurate and constructive feedback. A good leader shows interest in staff not only as project resources, but also as capable and important members of the project team.

Managing a project can be daunting. Whether planning your wedding, developing a new website or building your dream house by the sea, you need to employ project management techniques to help you succeed. I’ll summarise the top 7 best practices at the heart of good project management which can help you to achieve project success.

Define the scope and objectives

Firstly, understand the project objectives. Suppose your boss asks you to organise a blood donor campaign, is the objective to get as much blood donated as possible? Or, is it to raise the local company profile? Deciding the real objectives will help you plan the project.

Scope defines the boundary of the project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the blood bank within scope? Or, should staff make their own way there? Deciding what’s in or out of scope will determine the amount of work which needs performing.

Understand who the stakeholders are, what they expect to be delivered and enlist their support. Once you’ve defined the scope and objectives, get the stakeholders to review and agree to them.

Define the deliverables

You must define what will be delivered by the project. If your project is an advertising campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one deliverable might be the artwork for an advertisement. So, decide what tangible things will be delivered and document them in enough detail to enable someone else to produce them correctly and effectively.

Key stakeholders must review the definition of deliverables and must agree they accurately reflect what must be delivered.

Project planning

Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project.

You must define what activities are required to produce the deliverables using techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures. You must estimate the time and effort required for each activity, dependencies between activities and decide a realistic schedule to complete them. Involve the project team in estimating how long activities will take. Set milestones which indicate critical dates during the project. Write this into the project plan. Get the key stakeholders to review and agree to the plan.

Communication

Project plans are useless unless they’ve been communicated effectively to the project team. Every team member needs to know their responsibilities. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by huge paper schedules. The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he hadn’t shared the plan with them. The project hit all kinds of problems with people doing activities which they deemed important rather than doing the activities assigned by the project manager.

Tracking and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway you must monitor and compare the actual progress with the planned progress. You will need progress reports from project team members. You should record variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You should report variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations get too large.

You can adjust the plan in many ways to get the project back on track but you will always end up juggling cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager changes one of these, then one or both of the other elements will inevitably need changing. It is juggling these three elements – known as the project triangle – that typically causes a project manager the most headaches!

Change management

Stakeholders often change their mind about what must be delivered. Sometimes the business environment changes after the project starts, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer be valid. This often means the scope or deliverables of the project need changing. If a project manager accepted all changes into the project, the project would inevitably go over budget, be late and might never be completed.

By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes effectively is often a reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are events which can adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. I’ve worked on projects where risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work, hardware not being delivered on time, the control room at risk of flooding and many others. Risks will vary for each project but the main risks to a project must be identified as soon as possible. Plans must be made to avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to mitigate the risk to lessen its impact if it occurs. This is known as risk management.

You don’t manage all risks because there could be too many and not all risks have the same impact. So, identify all risks, estimate the likelihood of each risk occurring (1 = not likely, 2 = maybe likely, 3 = very likely). Estimate its impact on the project (1 – low, 2 – medium, 3 – high), then multiply the two numbers together to give the risk factor. High risk factors indicate the severest risks. Manage the ten with the highest risk factors. Constantly review risks and lookout for new ones since they have a habit of occurring at any moment.

Not managing risks effectively is a common reason why projects fail.

Summary

Following these best practices cannot guarantee a successful project but they will provide a better chance of success. Disregarding these best practices will almost certainly lead to project failure.