Project management survey 2007

I come across many articles and surveys in the course of my trawl of the internet. Here’s one that is really good!!

Themes from the survey include:

• more and more project management professionals are gaining accreditation - but which qualifications?


• people who took place in the survey felt there were too many accreditation bodies


• contractors are generally in the older age bracket


• 2006 was a challenging year in the remuneration stakes where only 38% saw an increase in their earnings.
  

Why not read the whole report which you can download here

Lots of projects but how well delivered?

You will see below the awful statistics which came out of the Heritage Lottery Fund. The figures are in line with other statistics which you can find on the internet.

To support companies and individuals to deliver more effectively we have written a White Paper called:

From Ready- Fire - Aim to Ready- Aim- Fire

How to improve project delivery, on time, to budget, every time.

Read all about it here......

Lottery Funded Projects - late and overbudget

An article in The Times (Friday March 16) points to:

• a quarter of the projects were completed late
  
• one in six projects overspent by an average of £293,000

The report quotes Sir John Bourn, head of National Audit Office which scrutinises public spending on behalf of Parliament concluded that the main cause of delays was “poor planning, and lack of project management skills by some of the applicants”, as well as “unanticipated events” during construction.

So why doesn’t the Heritage Lottery Fund train its applicants to manage projects more effectively…..??

You can read all about it by clicking here

Project Sponsorship.....time to improve?

I was looking at my web site recently – doing a bit of tidying up and came across an article I posted in March 2005 called Project management Screw Up 5 – We didn’t have the right sponsorship by Lonnie Pacelli.

He goes into some detail about the need for there to be a project sponsor. He says the following:

“…..every successful project always had an engaged project sponsor.”

Over the years Project Agency has worked with many organisations saying effectively the same thing to many of our clients.

Why not read the article? Click here or go to www.projectagency.co.uk/downloads.htm. It is the article headed: Poor Project Sponsorship.

Posted on the web site in 2005 and the issue is as current as ever i.e. we need more senior managers to play their role as project sponsors.

Free conference!!

I mentioned in my previous Blog a conference I went to. Well here is a free one.

You can go to PROJECT CHALLENGE. It is being held on 14 and 15 March. It has more than 50 organisations exhibiting and free seminars to attend.

You can find out more by going to www.projectchallenge.com

Enjoy the conference.

Old Blog!!

This is my second Blog site. I lost the other one - clumsy management of my password. In establishing the Blog I came across my old one and I still cannot get into it!

There is one postings which is worth listing again. Here is is.

I recently attended a conference and look what the speaker said:

• Focus on the values rather than the process e.g. PRINCE. For us this is important as we see people hanging on grimly to the project management process forgetting what it is trying to achieve
• 
  PRINCE is the framework, not the solution
• 
  Identify how much corrective action you need to take - measure this and measure again at the end of the project. How much corrective action has been saved? Identify the cost and time saved
• 
  Communicate, communicate communicate. If you are trying to put in a project management culture you need to recognise the changes required. Some of these will be supported by excellent communications
• 
  To develop the project management culture have a number of project champions from within the organisation
• 
  Developing a project assurance check sheet really helped to put quality onto the agenda
  Having formal project management roles (set out in documents) really helped (these were full time project managers)
• 
  For ALL projects, hold post project reviews identifying lessons learned. A new project is not started until the all relevant reports have been read!
• 
  Project sponsors were more active - through training and education
• 
  Developing a prioritisation process asked a lot of questions of us

This was written almost 2 years ago. Makes you think!