First P3O course in the USA

Core IS director Stephen Barney has successfully delivered the very first P3O course in the USA. The feedback suggests that this is the first of many.

P3O is about enabling organisations to successfully establish develop and maintain appropriate support structures to:

• Inform decision making on prioritisation, risk management and deployment of resources across an organisation to enable successful delivery of business objectives
• Identify and realise outcomes and benefits
• Delivery Programmes and Projects on time, within budget and to a quality

P3O provides a focal point for defining and delivering change across an organisation or any part of the organisation.

If you would like an answer to the questions:

• Why would a large US corporation be interested in P3O?
• What exactly doe P3O offer?
• Why have any form of P3O?
• How do we set up a P3O?
• What can P3O do for me?

Call us on 0845 833 3210 or email info@coreis.co.uk

Good advice that will only cost you the price of a phone call or email!

To re-accredit or not to re-accredit

You have been a Prince2 practitioner for five years and your original training organisation phones to ask if you would like to re-accredit you practitioner status. The question is to re-accredit or not!

The APMG (the accrediting body for the qualifications) allow your foundation status to last forever, but the practitioner status must be refreshed at least every five years.

Let's look at the benefits:

1. The 'Managing Successful Project with PRINCE2' manual was significantly updated in 2009. The changes have made what was already a very usable method into something that is now easier to tailor to any situation. Keeping up with these changes is essential if you are to continue to use 'best practice'.
2. In the current job market employers are often using the Prince2 practitioner qualification as the 'low water mark' so it is difficult to get an interview if you are not up to date.
3. While talking jobs, if you are unfortunate enough to be seeking employment it may be that you are pitted against another candidate, in which case the Prince2 qualification may be all that makes the difference.
4. Working well with others is so important these days - Prince2 allows for a common language and for transferable skills.

Looks like four good reasons to re-accredit, I'm sure that you can think of many more.

Remember that the other OGC qualifications need re-accrediting too (MSP and M_o_R).

For more information telephone 0800 833 3210 or email mike.austin@coreis.co.uk

Three wishes

Three men are working on a project in Blackpool, one is a software developer, one a hardware engineer and the other the project manager.
During their lunch break one day they decide to walk along the beach where they find a lamp. They pick it up, rub it and out pops a genii! He says that he would normally grant the person finding the lamp three wishes, but as there are three of them he will grant them one wish each.
The software developer goes first and wishes to retire to Hawaii with enough money to enjoy his retirement.
The hardware engineer goes next and wishes to spend his time sailing around the Mediterranean sea in a large yacht.
Finally the Project Manager get his wish and asks that the other two be back to work after lunch!
Do you know them???

Risk Management - Threat and Opportunity

Here is a really old story:

Many years ago two salesmen were sent by a British shoe manufacturer to Africa to investigate and report back on market potential.

The first salesman reported back, "There is no potential here - nobody wears shoes."

The second salesman reported back, "There is massive potential here - nobody wears shoes."

It made me think of the number of organisations that I come across that deal only with the threats and never see the opportunity.

Let me know what you think - mike.austin@coreis.co.uk

Project Management Sayings

I found these while surfing the web and thought that they might amuse you:

The sooner you start a task the later you finish.

What is not on paper has not been said.

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

If you fail to plan you are planning to fail.

A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.

The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.

A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected - a well-planned project only twice as long as expected.

If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven't understood the plan.

If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.

If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.

Good project managers know when not to manage a project.

If there were no problem people there'd be no need for people who solve problems.

Some projects finish on time in spite of project management best practices.

Good project managers admit mistakes: that's why you so rarely meet a good project manager.

Fast - cheap - good: you can have any two.

The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time the last 10% takes the other 90%.

The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale.

To estimate a project, work out how long it would take one person to do it then multiply that by the number of people on the project.

If it wasn't for the 'last minute', nothing would get done.

Nothing gets done till nothing gets done.

There is no such thing as scope creep, only scope gallop.

Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.

If project content is allowed to change freely the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress.

A project gets a year late one day at a time.

I hope that a least a few of these saying raised at least a smile

Why not email me if you have more - mike.austin@coreis.co.uk

Never use a password ever again

Most organisations have severe sanctions in place for folks that write down their passwords or change them infrequently, worse still those that have 'password' as their password.
The problem is of course that passwords are difficult to remember, even more so if you are required to change it every thirty days! Take comfort - you will never need to remember a password ever again.
The solution is to use a pass-phrase. Instead of remembering Vy65d7T use, perhaps, a line from your favourite song - in my case that Talking Heads classic 'burning down the house' remove the spaces and viola! An easy remembered way into your system, just make sure that it is at least 14 characters long, that should make it uncrackable for at least thirty days when you change it for another much loved lyric.
Another risk mitigated
can we help your organisation with risk management?
Call us today on 0845 833 3210

Risk Mitigation???

Labourer’s wife Bridget Driscoll took a trip to Crystal Palace (South East London) on 17 August 1896 and whilst there was run over by Arthur Edsall's imported Roger-Benz and so became the first road accident fatality in the United Kingdom.

So what was the risk involved, the car was reportedly doing the incredibly fast speed of 4 miles per hour, the driver said that he shouted a warning when he saw the woman in his path, he also said that he rang the warning bell – not much risk you may think!

Jerry Savage a local historian at the Upper Norwood Library remarks that the Victorians had no real sense of Health and Safety and so would probably have accepted the death as some sort of tragedy, but a few risk mitigations were put in place – it was soon required that three people were to take charge of a vehicle, a driver, a fireman to keep the car fuelled and a flag man to walk 60 yards in front of the car. Speed limits were reduced to 2 miles per hour in a town and 4 miles per hour in the countryside.

The coroner at Mrs Driscoll’s inquest said that he hoped hers would be the last such fatality – it is thought that since then more than 550,000 people have died on our roads.