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Establishing Project Objectives

We wrote the planning book because we saw so many organisations struggling with the quality of their planning. Schedule problems normally happen because of a lack of preparation in the early stages of the project rather than issues with the schedule itself.

We hope that these extracts will help to give you some ideas on how to improve the way things are being done in your organisation.

SRO Survival Guides extract – Vision and Blueprint

MSP Survival Guide for Senior Responsible Owners has been written specifically for the SRO, full of helpful advice to make your hectic life easier

There are many reasons why programmes fail, but failure to grasp the scale of the change being delivered and weak leadership of the programme teams are often contributing factors.
As they are unlikely to have time to read the MSP guide or to go on courses, we have covered the main things that you will need to know in a format that can be easily referenced.
In this series of extracts we are publishing a summary of the key points from each of the chapter of the MSP Survival Guide for SROs. If you would like to buy a copy, please follow this link and quote the discount code of SG15 for a 10% discount.
‘“If we don’t know where we are going, how will we know when we have arrived let alone how we are going to get there?”  – Yendor Nedwos
You need to grab the vision for the programme. The vision is the guiding star that should inspire those working on the programme on what may be a long and  challenging journey. People expect the leader to have a vision for a better future that they can follow, if you don’t believe in the vision, you will find it very difficult to be an effective and successful SRO
 Creating a blueprint challenges people to think through the consequences of the vision, which may identify issues and decisions that people would rather not have to make. Those decisions will fall to you to make, or you will need to present them to the sponsoring group or other senior people for them to make decisions. Without a blueprint it is not possible to effectively estimate benefits or what capability you will need delivered by the projects
Follow this link for a fuller extract – MSP Survival Guide for SROs tasters – Programme Vision and Blueprint
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Ever wondered why your projects mysteriously go wrong, when it was all looking so good?

When you did your project management training, how much did you do on planning ?
Well here is an indication,  APM PMQ has around half a day on planning, and PRINCE2 doesn’t really cover it at all.
That is why we wrote the book, to fill the gaps and help you to be more successful at delivering projects – planning isn’t a set of geeky techniques, it is at the core of everything you do.
Why not have a look at the TSO overview and even if you don’t buy it, we hope it will trigger some ideas or put things from the various bodies of knowledge into context.
We also have a really great 2 day course based on the book, why not give us a call to discuss – we even have it available as an eLearning course.

NAO insight into major programmes


This is a really interesting article posted on the  NAO blog that looks at the major lessons from programmes and projects in the last few years.

A systematic look at major programmes


The depressing thing is that most of the causes of failure are really well known and documented and yet we still keep making them, which suggests that people leading programmes and projects are either:

  1. Too arrogant to think they wont make the same mistakes, and then promptly do
  2. Too lazy to actually go out and investigate other peoples experiences, most of it can be found on google so they don’t even need to get our of their chairs
  3. Too dim to be able to process and implement the  advice they are being given.

Establishing Project Priorities

We wrote the planning book because we saw so many organisations struggling with the quality of their planning. Schedule problems normally happen because of a lack of preparation in the early stages of the project rather than issues with the schedule itself.

We hope that these extracts will help to give you some ideas on how to improve the way things are being done in your organisation.

MSP Survival Guide for SROs – Programme Business Case

MSP Survival Guide for Senior Responsible Owners has been written specifically for you (the SRO), full of helpful advice to make your hectic life easier
There are many reasons why programmes fail, but failure to grasp the scale of the change being delivered and weak leadership of the programme teams are often contributing factors.
As you are unlikely to have time to read the MSP guide or to go on courses, we have covered the main things that you will need to know in a format that can be easily referenced.
In this series of extracts we are publishing a summary of the key points from each of the chapter of the MSP Survival Guide for SROs. If you would like to buy a copy, please follow this link and quote the discount code of SG15 for a 10% discount.
Here is our advice for SROs on the Programme Business Case
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs.’ Scott Adams
The absolute worst sin you can commit is deliberately underestimating the cost and timescale to get your pet initiative accepted hoping once its underway it wont get stopped even though the cost increases. There are likely to be few if any winners but there will be lots of losers such as those who don’t get the benefits.
You should keep the business case close to hand (or at least the summary if it is one of the 100-page types). The business case is your contract with your Executive and investment decision makers, and you are accountable for delivering on that contract, so use it as your decision-making compass.
For the full extract, read on
MSP Survival Guide for SROs tasters – Programme Business Case

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What is project stakeholder management?

In a world where everyone is giving incredibly helpful advice that most of people ignore and walk, zombie-like, into failure, rather like some of the scenarios in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, so we thought it would be more fun to help speed up the process and provide you with helpful guidance on how to pass by the opportunity for success and head straight for failure.

These are the best ideas that our team have been able to come up with that will help guarantee failure where possible and remove any optimism from the outset.

  1. Ideally, don’t let anyone know the project is active, hopefully you will be able to fail without anyone noticing or caring.
  2. If your project does come to light by accident, overwhelm everyone with information on a daily (if possible) basis, hopefully they will quickly get bored and miss the important information. Eventually resulting in them asking you to leave them off of the distribution list.
  3. Ignore any questions and comments from troublemakers and certainly don’t give them the impression that you value feedback.
  4. If you need to communicate, create complicated messages with lots of detail about what the project will do so that that outcomes are really unclear
  5. Don’t bother to identify the stakeholders or segment the target audience, send the same information to everyone, it’s the only fair way to proceed and it saves time.
  6. The quickest communication methods (i.e. email) are the best, are always popular.
  7. Avoid the most important stakeholders – they probably won’t be interested anyway and you don’t want them remembering you for the wrong reasons.

If you would rather be successful, why not check out our video and make a start on our Project Management Fundamentals course on Stakeholder Engagement and Communications.

Lewis Hamilton – business change manager extraordinaire

There was a radio interview last week with the Mercedes team principal explaining how Lewis Hamilton was heavily involved in the technical development and the amount of time he spent with the construction team.
This has made for a great analogy  for people trying to understand how the BCM role in Managing Successful Programmes (MSP®) is supposed to work.

MSP® is a [registered] trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

Risk Management and UK Pandemic

For 12 months it has felt like we are living in the middle of a risk management reality TV show, living life in the middle of a risk register.

I’m sure P3M professionals everywhere must have been thinking – “I can’t believe this is happening”.  Imagine if you were the person that maintained the UK National risk register, how real those headings are now, rather than being breezed over in the monthly reviews. The reason for doing this is that we see so many risk registers that are full of bland and meaningless statements, this is a way of helping to make it more real.

We thought it would be interesting to put on our ‘Captain Hindsight’ hat to think about the information we have collated from recent press interviews and articles that we’ve picked up. Just for fun, we have taken the standard risk register headings and applied them to what we know now to help bring those headings to life.

  • Risk Title – a global pandemic will cause economic problems – we probably got that one right
  • Threat – Influenza germ – interviews with previous Secretary of State for Health stated apparently the UK didn’t consider anything other a flu pandemic (Operation Cygnus), unlike Asian countries.
  • Trigger Events – wet markets were a known source.  What seemed to be missing was that the main way of spreading was human travel and there was no attempt to stop travel until June, 4 months after the pandemic was taken seriously.   Asian and Australian countries shut down travel immediately.
  • Impact –up to 20,000 additional deaths (press conferences), but the reality is:
    • Health – it is now 6 times that and rising, with around 4,000,000 infections.
    • Economic damage – unimaginably big numbers and still rising
    • NHS becomes overwhelmed
  • Likelihood – Very low – but moved to Low on 23rd January, it was after all, a once in a century event.  In reality, Wave 2 and 3 were being talked about from the outset seemed to remain as “Very Low” even after it had was upon us.
  • Early Warning Indicators – it was not clear what was being monitored, although there was NATO military intelligence in December it was still regarded as a Low risk at the end of January in the UK, whilst:
    • events in Italy clearly didn’t ring any alarm bells.
    • the WHO were warning the world in early-mid January.
    • Asian countries deployed their track and trace.
    • Growth trend in mid March 2020 were beyond the worst of the worst case scenarios (Matt Hancock), this was what finally caused action.
  • Action Owners – government departments had risk budgets.
    • Apparently, their annual risk budgets were spent on things other than pandemic preparedness and various reports were mothballed after 2015 whilst the government focused on Brexit, lack of PPE was a major concern in the reports.
  • Mitigation Plans – all based on a flu pandemic and mothballed. What actually happened in the UK (Asian countries had all this in place).
    • Desperate search for ventilators.
    • The shortage of PPE identified 5 years earlier but not actioned.
    • Build test infrastructure across the country.
    • Invent vaccination and manufacturing infrastructure.
    • Create and deliver a test and trace service.
    • Face masks adopted 5 months later, first line of defence in Asia.

To enable a discussion, we will post this one soon to our Aspire Europe LinkedIn page and see how many people agree or disagree with this view.

This paper by the Oxford Research Group provides a great reference if you are interested.