You work in a major public service department or agency. It has an Enterprise PMO of some description – the team that prescribes programme and project management frameworks, and reports on major initiatives to top-level senior executives. It has been around for a while, and there is a feeling that now is the time to [...]
I was running a client briefing recently, and something wonderful happened: an unstructured conversation broke out, and I was left standing in the corner as a spectator. I abandoned the remainder of the briefing slides, and joined the conversation where I thought I could contribute. Afterwards I reflected that this should be the norm, [...]
While SES officers are critical to effective programme management or project management, the engine room is the community of APS practitioners who have a passion for making these disciplines cornerstones of high quality policy implementation. I was therefore delighted to see the Departments of Finance and Prime Minister and Cabinet have launched a renewed [...]
I am pleased to have been a contributor to the report “Learning from Failure”1 by Professor Peter Shergold AC, which was published in early February 2016. On page one of the report he says: “Leadership begins with finding the courage to say, ‘I accept personal responsibility for contributing to the failure to which I [...]
Here are three typical responses to the question “where are you with programme and project management?”: All our project managers are (say) PRINCE2®-qualified and we have a full set of templates on the intranet that they have to fill in. We’re given much theory and not enough about how to really do it. The [...]
“Risk, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again,” as Edwin Starr never sang. But, a bit like insurance, risk is one of those things that you wish you’d paid attention to after the fact. And it is a vital component of project and programme management regardless of the mental model you [...]
