PROJECT Management explored

How many times have you started a project without all the information about what required available...or where the client thinks they have given you everything but you know (and they often don't recognise) the gaps?  I'm guessing at least once, and probably quite a few times if you really think about it.  I know I have.

If using PRINCE2 to try and manage a project like this it can be difficult to work through SU and IP as essentials may be missing to finalise the Project Product Description and PID and often many assumptions are made (and hopefully stated) to enable progress to be made.  As the project progresses and better understanding and visibility enable the requirements to be more clearly defined projects often find their tolerances stretched or lots of time spent in issue management/change control and exception management as the team work through the mountain of RFCs that may result.  The nature of PRINCE2 projects which have a significant up front planning bias (for the project and at the beginning of each stage) means changes require expensive (time=cost) revisits and sometimes work that has already been undertaken is no longer required.

DSDM Atern provides an excellent solution to this by changing the way we look at delivering a project.  With DSDM Atern the project uses a prioritised requirements list and the scope is flexed to match a fixed cost and end date.  Key to managing this list in a logical way is to have frequent activity periods called timeboxes which have a subset of the prioritised requirements which are planned and delivered and the process repeated.  Some timeboxes may be devoted to development/production and others to research/prototyping and sometimes these are mixed so the project moves forwards in lots of bit sized manageable steps.  This way less effort if spent upfront planning things which are expected to change.

DSDM Atern has its own language, techniques and controls used to manage the process much of which will be familiar to those with some Scrum experience.  Over the coming weeks we will be exploring some of these techniques and controls and also looking at how these can be used in a PRINCE2 context to help manage those tricky projects where you know change is going to be the only real constant.

If you want to get started now then you are in luck as both Community Edition and the commercial PROJECT in a box systems now all provide DSDM Atern as standard.  As you will expect we have licensed the material from it's owners so you can use it with peace of mind.  The DSDM Atern method also comes with a useful amount of official guidance so if you are not familiar with the method you can check as you explore.