How MSP helped a tiny organisation... to survive

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 help regenerate run down urban areas

But it’s less well understood how a method like MSP can help small organisations or small teams.

Small organisations can face for the same need for transformational change as big organisations.

So let’s look at how very small voluntary sector organisation has benefited from MSP over the last few years. The organisation is indeed small, with only 5 staff. But from 2005, it identified some big problems… which could have threatened its very existence.

It’s a publicly funded organisation, and the management team saw that it was not delivering value for money to the funding bodies. It was time for change, time for transformational change, time to apply some MSP best practice. Otherwise, in today’s difficult times, the funding would have been cut, and the very future of the organisation put at peril.

Here’s three of the ways that MSP helped this tiny organisation to re-invent itself... and survive!

1) Develop a vision to drive the change: since end 2008 a vision statement has been in place. The organisation must change over the coming years. It must reinvent itself.

The vision statement explains where things are heading and helps to guide the change. At various annual meetings (AGM, board of control), the vision has been explained and agreed. This is the MSP way - build consensus for change, starting with a vision.

2) Analyse the stakeholders: from 2005, the organisation started to look at the funding bodies as stakeholders, not just as sources of income. MSP helps you to get a 360° vision, to view your situation from the point of view of the stakeholder. With MSP you seek to understand their interests, and to work out how to engage with each stakeholder.

3) Build a project dossier, run the next tranche: In 2010, by looking the stakeholder interests of the major funding body, the organisation identified several options to provide stakeholders with better value for money. One was an outreach project, providing services in a wider geographical area. Another project was educational, targeting 11-15 year-old school kids.

In MSP terms, this was a part of the project dossier, to be rolled out in the next tranche of the programme. Once the tranche plan was agreed, the projects were launched. Soon the outreach solution went live, and by 2011, the benefits were clear and measurable. The outreach was working in 12 towns. Equally, the educational project as fine - the schools were happy.

This tranche delivered clear benefits to a key stakeholder. The story continues today - additional opportunities, follow-up projects in more schools, new projects in the 12 towns… the new tranche is under way.

So we have seen three of the ways that MSP has helped a tiny organisation to reinvent itself. MSP can help your small business or your small team. It’s not just for the big guys!

4 ways that Prince2 saves you time

Prince2 can save you time. Here's 4 ways... there are many more!

1) Management by exception is a genuine time saver. It is essentially “hands-off” management - you establish the parameters for a block of work (a stage, a work package), and then delegate that work.
It’s hands off, but it nevertheless provides management and control. You focus on the decisions and the unexpected, which saves time at all levels of the project management team. Time is scarce. Your team is busy. Use scarce time wisely. That’s efficient.
Does management by exception really save time? Well, just look at some of the inefficient alternatives commonly used by non-Prince2 teams.

• “micro-management” is time consuming
• “management by walking around” can be irrational and unstructured
• “management by meeting” eats up man-days of effort in large, unproductive meetings

2) The Prince2 approach to planning saves time.
Prince2 encourages you to “rIght-size” your planning. Prince2 has three levels of plan

• You need a project plan, but it can be fairly simple. This is a summary plan, showing the key deliverables, the stage boundaries, some key milestones and some high level estimates. Because this is high level, it’s quicker to do. You are saving time by not writing a long, detailed plan.

• The stage plan is essentially a “just-in-time” plan with some extra detail. You don’t do detailed planning until you get near to the work concerned, and that saves you time as it avoids reworking your plan.

• The team plans contain the lowest level of detail. The Prince2 project manager delegates the creation of each team plan to the team manager. That make sense. And that’s more time saved for the project manager.

3) Quality - do the work once, don’t do it twice
Prince2 has a strong focus on quality. If you use it correctly, it can save you a lot of time. With Prince2, you do concrete, pragmatic work on quality early in the project, before your deliverables are produced.
If you don’t use this upstream approach to quality, you’ll probably waste time. You’ll discover the defects downstream. You’ll find out the customer’s quality expectations when you deliver. And you’ll probably fix any problems. But fixing quality defaults once the product is delivered can be very time consuming. You may end up doing the work twice… once to make the product, and a second time to fix it.
So addressing quality the Prince2 way saves you time. One of the most famous books on quality is called “Quality is Free”. The book says that addressing quality correctly doesn’t cost you time and money, it saves time and money. Prince2 agrees.

4) Don’t reinvent the wheel each project
Prince2 has a defined life cycle, with a defined set of roles and responsibilities. This saves you time.
Each project is unique. Without a method like Prince2, you start a project with a blank sheet of paper. You need to invent a way forward, you need to build a team and ways of working. With Prince2, your project is still a challenge, but you know how to address the key questions.
        ✓        You know how to get started, using the Prince2 “Startup up a Project” process.
        ✓        You know how to structure your team, with a Project Executive, a Project Manager and so on.
        ✓        You know you should get agreement on a Project Brief, your first major document.
        ✓        You know you will continue with the “Initiating a Project” process.
With Prince2, the first crucial weeks of your new project are mapped out.
You have a proven route map, even though your project is new and unique. Now that’s a real time saving.

Mapping the future, mapping the past with P3O

This is about understanding the past. It’s a case study, but it’s more than that. It’s about how we can better understand the past if we have a frame of reference.

The case study explains how a large company improved its project & portfolio management.

This multi-national organisation was structured as 7 business units. They had an ambitious change agenda. To deliver this huge amount of change, they needed to improve their project management.

They ran a 3-phase improvement initiative to improve project management

        ❑        Phase 1 introduced Prince2 project management, supported by heavy-duty EPM tools (Enterprise Project Management)

        ❑        Phase 2 measured regularly the improving maturity, by measuring the use of Prince2-based methods and the tools. With these measures, they found the weak spots, and took corrective action

        ❑        Phase 3 introduced portfolio reporting. It started once the level of maturity of Project Management was acceptable - it needed good quality project data as the starting point for consolidated portfolio reporting.

We can understand this case study in terms of P3O. That will be our frame of reference. P3O provides organisations with a top-down approach for improving their P3 (P3 stands for projects, programmes and portfolios). The O stands for Offices, so P3 + O gives P3O.

So let’s use the P3O framework. How does this case study look in P3O terms?

Retrospectively, we can detect the gradual construction of a P3O model, as the 3 phases advanced

        ❑        Phase 1. Local CoE functions were set up (Centres of Excellence) supporting the deployment of Prince2.

1. The local CoEs
   • published standards, procedures, templates
   • provided training, coaching
   • ensured tool support

        ❑        Phase 2. A centralised the CoE function emerged. The local CoEs were merged into a single unified CoE.

1. The central CoE
   • measured the maturity of Prince2 and tool using with a P3P3 approach (P3M3 is a maturity model)
   • provided an Information Portal with standards, procedures, templates, etc
   • continued to provide coaching to teams with low maturity

        ❑        Phase 3. A Portfolio Office structure was deployed, with a central Organisational Portfolio Office managed by a senior manager.

1. Each Portfolio Office
   • introduced Portfolio Design - budget management, demand management, resource optimisation, portfolio optimisation
   • coordinated Portfolio Delivery - monitoring and control of projects, data consolidation, status reporting

This provided the foundations for solid Project Management.

We can see that the P3O support was a key enabler

        ❑        The P3O structure was a key enabler of for project management. Without support from the CoE structures, this major Prince2 and tools deployment would not have succeeded, and the high maturity levels in Project Management would not have been achieved.

        ❑        The P3O structure was also an essential enabler for Portfolio Management structure. Without the Portfolio Office, the ambitious work to structure Portfolio Management would not have progressed. It was beyond the reach of the business managers responsible for the portfolios - the support of the Portfolio Offices in the P3O model was vital.

By looking back at the past, we learn lessons by finding a good frame of reference.

Now look forward to the future. To improve your organisation’s project management, use a good frame of reference. Try using the P3O framework to map out the future.

MSP: the 'Do Nothing' vision

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 encounter resistance. Both the future vision and the "do nothing" vision are useful to overcome resistance and to help motivate people to support the proposed changes.

In Nokia, the new boss, Stephen Elop came in from Microsoft with a new strategy. He wanted Nokia to work with Microsoft, and to put Windows on their smartphones. That meant abandoning Symbian and Meego, two existing Nokia operating systems.

He used the "burning deck" scenario to drive the change. This scenario said that "do nothing" was impossible. We - the Nokia team - are on a burning deck, and if we do nothing we will burn. We have a choice to jump off the deck, into the cold black sea below. This is a risk, but a risk that we must take. Doing nothing is certain death, whereas we might survive in the sea...

For Nokia, the do-nothing option was clear... uncompetitive products, declining market share, increasing irrelevance in the global marketplace. So Nokia took the risk, and jumped off the burning desk. They closed their Symbian and Meego teams and went for the Windows option.

Sometimes, doing nothing might appear to be a good choice.

Hewlett Packard have just voted for the "do nothing" choice. They were thinking of selling their PC business. They decided against it. They compared the option of floating off the PC unit with the option of doing nothing, and choose to do nothing.

Some say that, in the long running Euro-crisis, Angela Merkel is failing to provide leadership, and very often favours the "do nothing" option (or at least, do too little, too late)...

London 2012 Olympic Games

Lessons for MSP Programme Managers

For several years, the 2012 games have been criticised because their costs were constantly rising. Now, a different type of criticism is appearing, saying that some of the promised benefits will be hard to deliver.

This article reviews the London Olympics using the perspective of MSP (Managing Successful Programmes). As a major UK government initiative, this is reasonable - the Olympic Games programme should use MSP, which is the approved UK government Programme Management method

London 2012 Olympic Games - Tranches and Blueprints

If we analyse the 2012 Olympics as an MSP programme, then – here I simplify things – there are two main tranches. Tranche 1 is to prepare the games and run the event; Tranche 2 is to deliver the legacy. In this case, the programme will have two main Blueprints – an Intermediate Blueprint for the summer games in 2012, and a Final Blueprint that specifies the long-term outcome, where the stadium, the aquatic centre, etc. are handed over to the local community.

London 2012 Olympic Games – Initial Business Case

The London bid for the Olympics, as presented in Singapore in 2004, was full of promise. The list of benefits included

• 20,000 local construction jobs
• Boost to Tourism during the Games
• Legacy sporting venues (Stadium, Aquatic centre)
• A boost to Sport in UK
• Rejuvenation of East London
• New transport infrastructure

This gave a positive business case. For £2.3 billion of costs, the benefits would be high. An easy-to-justify Business Case.

London 2012 Olympic Games – Updated Business Case

Now, seven years later, the picture has changed. The preparation for the 2012 London Olympic Games is advancing. The major building works are done, and preparations for the summer games are well advanced.

The costs have risen, and keep rising. Some benefits are fragile or negative.

The cost estimates have grown and grown. The budget has grown from £2.3 billion to £9.3 billion. This cost growth has been widely documented, so I won’t discuss it here. The most recent cost expansion, identified this week, concerns security staff. The original plan (on the Intermediate Blueprint, i.e. for the 2012 Games period) included a major element for event security, with 10,000 security staff. This has been found to be insufficient, and 20,000 security staff will be needed, at considerable additional cost.

London 2012 Olympic Games – A benefits review

The benefits forecast has come under more recent scrutiny. Two major sporting venues will be created for the Games, the Aquatic centre and the Olympic stadium. Both have serious problems with their benefit realisation, but the problems with benefits are wider:

• 20,000 local jobs – The massive building programme created tens of thousands of construction industry jobs. On a recent BBC radio programme “File on Four”, local politicians explained that only a few hundred local residents got jobs. The benefit has not been delivered. In MSP terms, this benefit is badly profiled. A benefit profile must pass the DOAM test (Describable, Observable, Attributable, Measurable). The authorities can track the jobs and the workers, but there is no way to trace whether the workers are local people. Many building workers came from outside London, but now have London addresses while they are working on there. They are not local people, they are temporary residents. So this benefit profile fails the DOAM test – not observable and/or not measurable – and is therefore hard to claim as a benefit for the programme. This benefit should therefore be removed from the Benefit Map and the Business Case.
• Boost to Tourism - Many politicians are still talking of increased tourism due to the Games. This is a just a dream. The politicians need to learn from the past. As a recent article in “The Economist” explains “Since the 1992 Barcelona games, hosts have seen a fall in foreign guests during each Olympics, as well as in the months before and after”. This supposed benefit is therefore actually a dis-benefit, because there will be fewer tourists in 2012 than in a normal year. Indeed some West End theatre owners fear they will have to close their shows next summer due to lack of customers. This dis-benefit makes the already bad programme Business Case even worse.
• Legacy – the Aquatic Centre. The Final Blueprint for the programme specifies that the aquatic centre will be a community leisure pool, with slides and toboggans. Have fun, bring the kids! However the intermediate blueprint for the aquatic centre is not aligned to this need. The aquatic centre has now been built – it’s a large, iconic architectural masterpiece, probably good for the summer Olympics. But it has low roof, which cannot be converted to give room for the future slides and toboggans, which will attract families with kids. Additionally, the large prestigious building will be expensive to run and maintain (perhaps £2m per year). So the benefit delivery from the aquatic centre may be bad, with high costs and low income. The cashable value of the benefit will go down, and the programme Business Case gets worse.
• Legacy – the Stadium. The second legacy venue is the stadium. The initial benefit realisation plan for the Olympics proposed the sale of the stadium, but this has hit major problems. The expected sale to either Tottenham or West Ham football clubs hit legal issues, and the stadium will now be rented, not sold, which directly hits the benefits stream and the programme Business Case. No rental contract has been signed, so a large cash benefit has been replaced by a possible long-term rental income. Worse, the new rental tenant may ask for building work as a condition for rental, which would add to programme costs.
• Regeneration of East London – the Village – The Olympic village will be built for the Games, and then converted into housing, at a cost of £1.1billion. This seems to have been sold to developers for £825million. While some politicians dispute the figures, it seems to that the regeneration (an intangible benefit) must be balanced by a significant cost or dis-benefit (the £275 million loss on the sale of the Village).
• Regeneration of East London – the Media Centre. A huge building has been built for the media, to support 20,000 journalists and TV crews during the games, at a cost of a third of a billion pounds. However, there is no decision, and no clear plan about the legacy use of the Media Centre. The Final Blueprint is unclear, after 7 years!

London 2012 Olympic Games – Not a viable programme?

For any normal Programme, the Business Case is regularly reviewed. A golden rule of MSP is that if the Business Case is bad, the programme should be halted. The Business Case of the 2012 Games looks very bad, with high costs and low benefits. Additionally, the Business Case has been artificially lightened by hiding many costs, such as infrastructure improvements (£6.5 billion) and counterterrorism (£1 billion)

However, this programme is a political programme, with the UK prestige at stake. In reality, the programme will not be halted. This once-justifiable programme seems to have become an expensive folly.

London 2012 Olympic Games – Lessons for MSP Programme Managers

The lesson for Rio 2016 and for future Olympic Games? In the recent BBC radio programme “File on Four”, the final comment from a London politician gives us a key lesson about Stakeholder Engagement – “Make sure that the people who are responsible for your legacy are there at the start; don’t plan an Olympic Games where everybody is in there just for the purposes of delivering an Olympic Games”. A good lesson for Rio and a good lesson for all Programme Managers.

© Copyright Triotime 2011

Aim high to build a high performance team

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 Management. But it’s important to set the right goal.

When you start to deploy a best practice framework like Prince2 or MSP for your team or company, you should set the goal high. You want a high performance team, not just a few star performers. If you create team-wide strength in project management, you can really start to deliver your organisation’s change agenda.

Some organisations hesitate to standardise on a framework like Prince2; perhaps they train a few people, but they don’t roll it out to everyone.

They are missing the benefits of a generalised solution. The way to get full benefit from a framework like Prince2 is to generalise its use.

There are three reasons why you should widen the rollout of a framework like Prince2 or MSP:

1) each framework is relatively simple to learn so training is short and relatively cost effective

2) a framework provides a single point of truth to unite the team

3) a framework helps your organisation to improve and innovate.

Let’s look at those points

1) Speed: Learn in a week

All the best practice frameworks from OGC (Prince2, MSP, MoP, P3O, etc) are reasonably simple to understand. With a week’s training, you can understand the key concepts, pass an exam and get a basic understanding of how to use the framework.

At the team or enterprise level, this means that all your team can learn your method. You can train them all. This is a key to success.

2) Single point of truth

If your organisation uses a framework such as Prince2, you have an external reference.

There are thousands and thousands of books on Project Management. Every author has his or her own ideas. If you don’t have some reference point for your organisation, every Project Manager will have his or her own ideas.

Prince2 has condensed a huge diversity of opinion into one book, which covers a major part of Project Management . That means that an organisation which adopts Prince2 has started to simplify its Project Management problem. With Prince2, you start to introduce a single vocabulary, a single point of view, a single intellectual framework. That’s significant added value, and a second key to success.

3) Improve and innovate

Don’t be worried by Prince2’s apparent complexity. Treat it like a supermarket which stocks 10,000 items, but you only need a week’s groceries. It up to you to choose. You can adapt Prince2 to your needs. This is what Prince2 calls “tailoring”.

If you tailor Prince2 with intelligence, it becomes a springboard to innovation. It becomes easier to implement, easier to use, and easier to adapt to your business needs.

You should start with the standard framework of Prince2, then simplify in order to implement it. If you hit barriers to implementation, then simplify it further. (That’s quite normal - the first simplification is never quite enough!). This simple core is your starting point. It’s your foundation for building team-wide high performance.

As you continue, you can build on this foundation. You have focussed on the essentials of your project management problem. You have a basis for continuous improvement, for further innovation. And that’s your third key to success.

That’s three keys to success to building in-depth strength, and a high performance team. You need to aim high to increase your project capacity, and to meet the challenge of delivering an ambitious change agenda. Aim high, deliver high performance.

Aim high to build a high performance team

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 Management. But it’s important to set the right goal.

When you start to deploy a best practice framework like Prince2 or MSP for your team or company, you should set the goal high. You want a high performance team, not just a few star performers. If you create team-wide strength in project management, you can really start to deliver your organisation’s change agenda.

Some organisations hesitate to standardise on a framework like Prince2; perhaps they train a few people, but they don’t roll it out to everyone.

They are missing the benefits of a generalised solution. The way to get full benefit from a framework like Prince2 is to generalise its use.

There are three reasons why you should widen the rollout of a framework like Prince2 or MSP:

1) each framework is relatively simple to learn so training is short and relatively cost effective

2) a framework provides a single point of truth to unite the team

3) a framework helps your organisation to improve and innovate.

Let’s look at those points

1) Speed: Learn in a week

All the best practice frameworks from OGC (Prince2, MSP, MoP, P3O, etc) are reasonably simple to understand. With a week’s training, you can understand the key concepts, pass an exam and get a basic understanding of how to use the framework.

At the team or enterprise level, this means that all your team can learn your method. You can train them all. This is a key to success.

2) Single point of truth

If your organisation uses a framework such as Prince2, you have an external reference.

There are thousands and thousands of books on Project Management. Every author has his or her own ideas. If you don’t have some reference point for your organisation, every Project Manager will have his or her own ideas.

Prince2 has condensed a huge diversity of opinion into one book, which covers a major part of Project Management . That means that an organisation which adopts Prince2 has started to simplify its Project Management problem. With Prince2, you start to introduce a single vocabulary, a single point of view, a single intellectual framework. That’s significant added value, and a second key to success.

3) Improve and innovate

Don’t be worried by Prince2’s apparent complexity. Treat it like a supermarket which stocks 10,000 items, but you only need a week’s groceries. It up to you to choose. You can adapt Prince2 to your needs. This is what Prince2 calls “tailoring”.

If you tailor Prince2 with intelligence, it becomes a springboard to innovation. It becomes easier to implement, easier to use, and easier to adapt to your business needs.

You should start with the standard framework of Prince2, then simplify in order to implement it. If you hit barriers to implementation, then simplify it further. (That’s quite normal - the first simplification is never quite enough!). This simple core is your starting point. It’s your foundation for building team-wide high performance.

As you continue, you can build on this foundation. You have focussed on the essentials of your project management problem. You have a basis for continuous improvement, for further innovation. And that’s your third key to success.

That’s three keys to success to building in-depth strength, and a high performance team. You need to aim high to increase your project capacity, and to meet the challenge of delivering an ambitious change agenda. Aim high, deliver high performance.