PROJECT Management explored

As you might expect with well over 60,000 users of Community Edition and 1,000 plus commercial customers we are often being asked questions about new features or methodologies and we thought we might share some of these with you by including one each month on our newsletter and also in our social media streams.  We are interested in what you think so please let us know or if you have a question you would like us to ask.......contact us.

The June Question relates to PMBOK the project management framework from the PMI and is asked by one of our existing corporate customers wanting to roll PROJECT in a box out into a PMBOK dominated environment overseas:

'What have peoples experiences been of implementing their own method template into a PMI/PMBOK environment?  How extensively have method templates had to be tailored to reflect the language and framework differences in the new environments?  What were the lessons learned?'

If you have experience in this area we would love to know and put you in touch to pass it on.

Want to make high quality guidance resources available to your teams in an intuitive, integrated and assured manner?  Good news then we have a great solution for you.

Here at PROJECT in a box we are now TSO resellers and this enables us to integrate links to the TSO's on-line versions of OGC publications into our method templates.

In practice this means that when projects are created from these method templates and users are invited to work on the projects the links will be provided consistently across all projects of that type. Clicking the link will take the user to the best practice website and directly into the material in question.  Of course to view the content the user must have access to the best practice site, we can provide this under licence from TSO on an annual (either individual or multi-user) basis.

In keeping with the flexibility offered by the PROJECT in a box method template approach this would enable customers to set up their own arrangements of links to key guidance materials to suit the type of projects they were undertaking.  In fact in the first delivery of this we set up sets of links for a number of scaled PRINCE2 methods for a new customer, enabling them to get up and running very quickly.

The full range of OGC publications are available in English and a number of translations are also available.  Additional translations can also be secured is sufficient concurrent users are required.

Contact us if you want to see this in action.

Since I last blogged on languages we now have translated language files starting to be made available for Community Edition.

Many thanks to Jose Luis Fernandez for providing the Spanish Language file. You can read Jose's PRINCE2 Blog here: http://jlfr-prince2.blogspot.com .  The Spanish language file can be downloaded from the Community Edition Knowledge Base along with instructions on how to add it to your tool.

If you would like to create your own language file you can just follow the instructions in the Knowledge Base.

Lessons Learned is a difficult area and an important one to get right.  We all make mistakes as we human and we all face challenges on our projects that is the unexpected nature of projects but the occurrences and impacts of these can be reduced if we learn lessons from those that have been in the same or similar situations before us.

It is obvious but very difficult to achieve.  Even after you have got over the significant challenge of getting people to record the problems they faced (as we are as much talking about challenges as opportunities) on a project you still have to share this information back into following projects in a focussed and helpful way.  Recently we set up a very helpful and simple solution for a PROJECT in a box customer to help them with the process.

We created a very simple Single step method template called Lessons Archive and created a project from it which was made available to all users with read access.  Using the share documents between projects feature we then linked in the Lessons Learned Log from each project on the system so it was shared into the Lessons Archive project.  This means that any content placed in the Lessons Learned Log document in the original projects will be available through the Lessons archive and it's content indexed for searching.  When a new project is starting the PM can visit the Lessons Archive and search the indexed content from all previous projects by providing their key words and being given the matching results which they can then view to find out more.

Because the documents are live shared between the original project and the Lessons Archive, if the project is archived or removed from the server it's Lessons Learned log document contents will be retained in the Lessons Archive so building an increasing archive of content for the following projects to take advantage of.

As further extensions it would be possible to provide a link to the Lessons Archive in all new projects (by adding it to the method templates) so guiding new PMs directly to an area where they could search the archive and to automatically notify the Archive owner (perhaps the head of PMO) of any new additions to the archive contents with notifications.

Creating these simple, intuitive tools is straightforward in PROJECT in a box and a good demonstration of how the tool set provided can be used to your advantage.  If you would like to see this in action or add a Lessons Archive to your PROJECT in a box system, drop me an email and I will share the method template.