Hoadlands Consultants Ltd

A Project - a series of activities with  a beginning - an end, and the steps / activities and tasks required to get between the beginning and the end - easy isn't it!

The role of the Project Manager is to provide the management skills, tools, drive and monitoring to support a project from beginning to end.

Well, almost, but it's never that easy, some of the common issues with Project Management include;

• The beginning is not specified well enough or too many assumptions are made
• The end point not fully specified or changes rapidly during the project execution
• The "how to get there" not well defined or correctly resourced, typically a lack of interim check points or milestones is also common problem which means the issues can be highlighted too late to take remedial action.
• The tools and process for reporting and tracking the project aren't fully understood or used properly

We can help with all of the above; we tend to focus on the use of formal Project Management methods, but we see the key point is to use the right amount of "formal" methods for the organisation and project in question.

Project Management methodologies

There are many project management methodologies out there, some of the more useful ones are;

PRINCE2

PRINCE (which stands for Projects in Controlled Environments) was first developed by the UK government in 1989 as the standard approach to IT project management for central government. The current version is PRINCE2 2009.

• The official UK government source for PRINCE2 is the Office of Government Commerce (OGC),an independent office of HM Treasury, their PRINCE2 web page can be found at  http://www.ogc.gov.uk/methods_prince_2.asp, however the commercial implementation can be found on many web sites,
• OGC's partner, the APM Group Ltd (APMG) is responsible for maintaining standards in training and certification by accrediting organisations and individuals.  Full details of all supporting services are available from http://www.prince2.org.uk/, this redirects to http://www.apmg-international.com/APMG-UK/PRINCE2/PRINCE2Home.asp.

ITIL

In a similar vein to PRINCE2, ITIL also has it's source in the UK OGC, the IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world.  The official home of ITIL can be found on the web at http://www.itil-officialsite.com/home/home.asp.  The current version of ITIL is version 3.