PROJECT Management explored

Many customers come to us say they are looking for a system as they want to, or have been told to  implement PRINCE2.  With PROJECT in a box being the leading PRINCE2 software solution and providing authentic PRINCE2 process and templates under licence this seems an obvious and cost effective way to go.  We also provide as standard, pre scaled PRINCE2 methods so customers can give a lighter PRINCE2 treatment to a small, low risk project than to a large complex and risky project.

The comfort this approach gives customers often means that even though we advise against they implement straight out of the box using the standard methods as provided.  Whilst this isn't a critical issue in itself it will mean  more work for each PM during start up to personalise the documents to their project and the potential loss of other important benefits.

What we strongly encourage, as does the PRINCE2 manual,  is a good degree of personalisation and by building this into the standard method templates at launch you can make sure this work is undertaken once and used on every project.  The work generally falls into three areas:

• Branding - as simple as putting your logo on every template or a complete styling of the browser interface and branding enhancement of the navigation diagrams.  This is straightforward to do and has a significant effect on the end users who now start to see the tool and methodology as theirs rather than an external imposition.
• Content - most organisations already have some templates which are well used already  such as business cases or mandates and these can be used to replace the standard ones provided.  Unless of course one of your reasons to implement is to replace documentation which is perceived to be insufficient, in which case you might like to take the style of the previous templates but add to the recommended fields.  Content needn't just mean files, you can also template hyperlinks and windows short cuts to important resources inside and outside the organisation i.e. links to policy documents on your intranet.
• Data collection - if you are planning on using PROJECT in a box to do your project, programme or portfolio reporting then you can alter the collection spreadsheets and forms provided to the projects so that the correct information is collected and aggregated for reporting.

This is all work that you can do yourselves to keep implementation costs down but also to ensure you have 'ownership' of your methods going forwards so you can keep evolving them as the nature of projects or your project environment changes.

Some customers take this much further and create domain specific project method templates such as having a method for an R&D project, a method for a production project and a method for a marketing launch.  If your organisation has some project consistency in domain areas like this and each type of project uses lots of specialist documents which are not used by other project types then this can be a great way of supporting the project teams with what they need to deliver in their particular environment.  Often we see these moves as a second step of evolution once users have been through several project cycles and find that they are often personalising their projects in the same way.

These sort of changes offer many benefits to the project teams, Project Managers and the organisation, to name but a few:

1. Time saving for the project manager and teams personalising a project from template
2. Better buy in from teams who feel less imposed upon
3. Engagement from the project managers and administrators who are empowered to keep the approach relevant because they can.....(if just following the standard PRINCE2, say from a book, which they can't change there is a tendency to say 'yes we know the language is clumsy' or 'that process doesn't work for us' but it can't be changed.  Instead actively engaging in post project reviews and feeding back user requests into methodology revisions and enhancements which they can control)

So in short, make your methodology feel at home and it will work better for you, like wearing a collection or tailored clothes as opposed to one single suit from a rack.  After all if you were going for a swim you wouldn’t choose to wear your suit would you?