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 P3M Community of Practice and Virtual P3M Centre of Excellence to support APS collaboration in building P3M capability.

P3M Community of Practice

The P3M Community of Practice (CoP) is an APS wide network of P3M practitioners who come together to share, learn and promote good portfolio, programme and project management practices. The vision of the enhanced CoP is to build a collaborative knowledge sharing network of P3M practitioners to strengthen APS delivery capability and promote greater recognition by the APS.

Membership is voluntary and open to permanent or non-ongoing APS staff.

Virtual P3M Centre of Excellence

The concept of a virtual P3M CoE is to provide free exchange of APS focussed P3M advice; where professionals can connect and learn from each other, solutions can be developed to common challenges and P3M capability can be built across the APS.

What will the P3M CoP and CoE achieve?

In my opinion a great deal. Much good work has already been done by the P3M CoP, and if you haven’t already been involved, I commend it to you. It’s a great way to learn from the experience of other public servants facing similar challenges to the ones you face.

As trainers and consultants we spend a fair bit of time “connecting” people in different parts of the APS to one another. That’s fine, and it’s a role we’re very happy to perform, but it’s even better to see the APS establishing mechanisms by which the collective wisdom of APS P3M practitioners can be harnessed for the good of all.

Note to SES officers – make sure you give your P3M specialists time to attend and contribute to time these initiatives (I couldn’t resist signing off on that note).

Want to know more?

There are more details on both these initiatives on this Department of Finance webpage.

If you would like to know more about programme management or project management in the APS, please call me personally on 0407 404 688 or email me at john.howarth@tannerjames.com.au. I would be very happy to come to meet you, answer questions and provide further information.

What do you think?

Please feel free to comment on the blog itself or via LinkedIn.