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One of the vital components of a successful Project and Programme Manager is leadership.

Leadership capabilities are a key element of the behavioural competence among such professionals and, indeed, a Project or Programme Manager is someone people should choose to follow. When that happens and people engage with what the practitioner is trying to achieve, it’s more likely that a project or programme will deliver results on time, within budget and of high quality.

However, some Project and Programme Managers approach their work from a technical perspective and may not recognize leadership as part of their role.

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In this, the first of a series of blogs on the use of PRINCE2 outside of traditional project management roles, we speak to Dan Verghese, Head of Digital at AXELOS, on how the guidance helps in the management of digital projects.

How have you used PRINCE2 during your career?

I completed my PRINCE2 training early on in my career in digital marketing and, since then, I’ve used the guidance in a variety of ways and across a broad range of roles.

In my previous job I often acted as a Project Manager, responsible for delivering a variety of small to medium-sized digital projects with external agencies. In this position, I worked to a project plan and Project Initiation Documentation (PID), allocated actions and work packages to teams and regularly reported on progress using the PRINCE2 concept of highlight reports. So while not a typical project management role, it’s easy to see how the processes and guidance within PRINCE2 were extremely applicable.

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CIOs have overall responsibility for IT strategy within a business and are accountable for the governance and management of IT resources.

In most organizations, the CIO is someone with a broad knowledge of IT and is able to provide vision and leadership in all aspects of IT management.

As a leader in the business, the CIO works with other senior managers to define, articulate and champion an organization’s strategic and operational plans, identifying where the business is growing and how a robust IT strategy can support and stimulate growth.

What are the typical tasks of a CIO?
....

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Incident Managers are crucial to IT service operations in any organization. When something goes wrong, they provide immediate support, commanding and controlling major incidents.

A successful Incident Manager needs to be proactive and a real people person. But what other skills do they need to excel in the role?

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Abid Ismail was named the new CEO of AXELOS in December 2015, having been Chief Financial Officer since the company was formed in 2013.

In a series of blog posts by Abid that will focus on the different stages of learning, development of knowledge and learning validation, this first post considers the value of continuous learning.

Starting down the path of lifelong learning is principally about one thing: making a difference.

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www.axelos.com/news/blos

This blog (abridged from my original 3000-word version) isn’t meant to be a review of the new ITIL Practitioner Guidance publication, although you might feel it sails close, and instead talks to the content that stands out for me, i.e. the stuff that will really help the reader.

The new book is probably not what you might have expected, i.e. ITIL process help. Instead it covers much of the operational, management, and organizational “glue” required not only to adopt ITIL, and/or to improve ITSM maturity, but also to be a well-functioning IT service provider.

Standout #1: Let’s Start with the ITIL Practitioner Authors

Straight off the bat, the authors instilled me with a certain level of confidence. I can’t speak for Kevin Behr and Lou Hunnebeck, who I don’t know personally, but the quartet of Karen Ferris, Barclay Rae, Stuart Rance, and Paul Wilkinson would not get involved with (nor attach their names to) any publication, ITIL or otherwise, that doesn’t take the ITSM industry forward.

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Do you have what it takes to be a Business Relationship Manager (BRM)?

What does a BRM do?
The role is responsible for building relationships between the IT organization and the business units to ensure IT services meet the needs of business customers. BRMs collaborate with the business to shape and prioritize IT requirements and decide what services are needed to deliver them. Overall, it’s about getting the best return from IT.
Why is the role important?

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Typically, the scope and duration of programmes is significantly greater than that of a single project.

Consequently – and in contrast to projects – they demand greater leadership and stakeholder management skills from programme delivery professionals in order to achieve programme success.

Firstly, Programme Managers are required to deal with a far wider range of stakeholders. Many of these stakeholders are (often senior) operational managers from multiple divisions within the organization with conflicting views on the current position and associated problems, the strategy deployed and the planned approach.

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Company culture is a cornerstone of business success as staff sign up to an agreed way of working, improving employee wellbeing and the bottom line, but change must be carefully managed.

Want to work at Google? Then you’ll need a healthy dose of Googleyness. It is officially specified as one of the four qualities each recruit needs. An interview panel of four or five Googlers will examine you for Googleyness.

And what is it? The human resources team say they’ll “be looking for signs around your comfort with ambiguity, your bias to action and your collaborative nature”. The policy is regarded at Google as a key factor in the growth from startup to the world’s most valuable corporation in 18 years.

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www.raconteur.net/business

Does your organization have a problem with delivering projects and are you wrestling with the question: “how do we start to improve our projects?”

It might seem like a simple question but the answer is more complex. This is because there is no universal right answer, as different organizations will face different problems, rendering a “quick fix” very difficult or even impossible. Training people might be a vital element in solving these problems, but can be decided only once you’ve taken an important first step: identifying what problems you’re trying to solve:

* It might be that the projects don’t line up with or fully deliver the organization’s strategy. This could be caused more by project selection, i.e. portfolio management, than how the organization runs projects once authorized.

* It may be how projects are initiated and run: the UK’s National Audit Office and Cabinet Office have identified common causes of project failure, such as getting the project off on the right foot and senior leadership/engagement.

These are just examples of the possible problems your organization has with projects. There could be a multitude of others which you need to pinpoint before working out the optimal course of action. And this needs a comprehensive and structured approach.

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www.axleos.com/news/blog

Aiming at getting faster results, agile business methods will also delight customers and allow staff to have more fun.

Do you think your business is working efficiently? Do you believe you’re delivering good value to your customers? Do your products and services delight customers? Are your staff enjoying their work?

If your answers to any of these questions is “no”, then you could consider embracing an agile business approach. That’s according to Ken Rubin, author of Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process, who adds pointedly: “In a world of uncertainty, you need an approach that helps you understand what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.”

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In an ever-faster business world, organisations must stay agile, always ready to adapt to changing times and increasing demands.

These are some of the most exciting and challenging times to run a business because the pace of change has never been quicker thanks to new technology and global communications.

Business leaders need to be more nimble to cope with this fast-moving world of constant evolution. The consulting firm Deloitte found that 83 per cent of businesses plan to adopt more agile methods.

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Improving an organization’s agile capability can take many forms:

It can involve training people in product-focused frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban, or project-focused frameworks such as PRINCE2 Agile® and AgilePM/DSDM. Along with this it can include coaching and mentoring departments and organizations where their existing working practices may be a more mixed and generic agile style.

What we typically experience through our work at agileKRC is a very positive view of agile – that it’s improving how people are working. However, we also recognize the difficulty in measuring and quantifying how much things have improved.

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www.axelos.com/news/blog

Smart technology is now extracting greater meaning from more connected information sources with the potential of benefiting society and the bottom line.

Talking to a friend about this article, she asked me what “information of everything” meant. I explained that it encompassed, among other things, the automatic sharing of information between connected devices, big data, the internet of things and the cloud.

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As the Christmas chaos subsides and sale racks clear, it’s time to take a considered look at how technology can help retailers ensure loyalty and long-term success.

According to research by digital performance firm Dynatrace, nearly a third of UK consumers shop through a combination of online, mobile and in-store channels. As such, it’s important to understand how your target customers are using technology in the purchasing pathway. Each business will be different but our infographic – The New Purchasing Pathway – provides a useful introduction:

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www.raconteur.net/business

Organizational Change Management (OCM) is an approach to managing the people side of change. Any IT Service Management (ITSM) initiative, small or large, individual, team or department driven will in some way affect people.

The OCM approach is about identifying where any resistance to change is coming from in order to manage it while keeping all stakeholders and sponsors on board.

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www.axelos.com/news/blog

The new ITIL® Practitioner qualification is about giving IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals practical guidance that allows them to truly adapt and adopt ITIL® in their organization.

Practitioner is very much going to be about continual improvement as much as practical guidance; it will work in day-to-day, business as usual activity as well as the bigger initiatives ITIL is so often associated with.

For that reason there are several key areas of ITIL and ITSM that we are expanding upon in the guidance and communication is one of them.

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Hard on the heels of Talk Talk are Vodafone and Marks & Spencer. Like Talk Talk, Vodafone can be classed as a ‘cyber security’ breach, whilst Marks & Spencer is a more traditional, technical error that just so happened to affect its website, demonstrating how closely intertwined the new, cyber risks are with the old.
 
Risk management has become more complex. Its scope includes threats as well as the traditional risks, and its impacts are transparently obvious. Boundaries between internal and external risks have merged: ‘business-as-usual’ is having to merge with ‘business continuity’ to meet the demand for 24/7 business availability. Welcome to the new world of business resilience. And to COBIT 5.

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www.blog.apmg-international.com

There are, as you may know, a few key differences between agile and traditional waterfall projects, when managed using PRINCE2®.

Matt PerkinsTraditional waterfall projects are delivered sequentially, whereas agile projects tend to be iterative and incremental. Traditional project practitioners are constantly balancing between the six controls of time, cost, benefits, risk, scope and quality - within defined and agreed tolerances. On the other hand Agile project practitioners in a PRINCE2® environment will be fixing time and cost tolerances to zero, whilst being change friendly in regard to scope.

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ITIL® Practitioner to help organizations and individuals increase the value they obtain from adopting the ITIL framework.

AXELOS has announced that ITIL Practitioner – the new qualification of the world’s most widely adopted service management framework – will launch globally in February 2016.

Speaking at the FUSION15 service management conference in New Orleans, USA, AXELOS CEO Peter Hepworth said that the new qualification was the most significant recent evolution in the ITIL best practice framework, which was first introduced in 1989 and is now - after going through several iterations - used in more than 150 countries globally with more than 300,000 ITIL exams sat in 2014. As part of the development of ITIL Practitioner, AXELOS has used crowdsourcing – gathering ideas, current challenges and advice from IT service management (ITSM) professionals from across the world.

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