AFA Blog
Are You Ready for the End of the Recession?
Yes I think we are in recession whatever the spin doctors are trying to tell us. But it won’t last forever and our job as business leaders is to prepare our companies for the end of the recession. So here at AFA we are continuing to develop new products – our exciting Programme Management eLearning [...]
PRINCE2 Professional for Personal Experience
I successfully completed a PRINCE2 Professional pilot assessment centre a few weeks ago. It was very hard work but great fun. If your knowledge of PRINCE2 is theoretical (or even a bit rusty), or you are uncomfortable cooperating with others to achieve a deadline, perhaps you should give PRINCE2 Professional a miss. But if you [...]
Product Based Planning – Beyond the Manual
I flew across to mainland Europe last week to run a workshop for the PRINCE2 Trainers of a partner company. Amongst other topics, we wanted to look beyond the description of Product Based Planning in the current PRINCE2 Manual. In particular, they asked me to give them some practical hints and tips. In the 2009 [...]
Integrating Best Practice in Change Delivery
The BPUG Conference last month had the theme of integration. I’ll post a link to the video of my talk when it is available. But, last week with a client in Germany, I was discussing implementation of P3O and other practices and I have come up with a few thoughts. I’d be interested in your [...]
What is an Enterprise risk management
When updating Management of Risk (M_o_R) recently we had a long discussion how we should address Enterprise Risk Management. M_o_R is holistic structured risk management for the whole organisation. Isn’t that the common sense definition of Enterprise Risk Management? Well some argued differently. They define Enterprise Risk management as seeking to understand the relationships between [...]
Best Practice User Group
BPUG have chosen integration as their topic for this year’s conference. Confirming that the world has moved from simple project and programme management to a world where we can, and need, to use a larger suite of methods. If you have been reading Alan’s blog posts recently, you will know we have been using the [...]
Do you feel Lucky, Punk?
I’ll leave you to look up details of Clint Eastwood’s famous line in the movie Dirty Harry. He was asking the baddie about his risk appetite! Over the last couple of days I’ve come across three great examples of organisational risk appetite, so I thought I’d share them with you. Yesterday I delivered our first [...]
Perspectives of Delivery – Peas in a Pod
I’ve just been reviewing the draft 6th Edition of the APM Body of Knowledge. It got me thinking, again about the word for all the different change delivery methods. What do I mean? Well If I asked you what apples, oranges and bananas were examples of, you would quickly answer – fruit. Or tables ,chairs [...]
Just what is Project Management?
There is a great LinkedIn discussion “Define Project Management in exactly 6 words. Its here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Define-Project-Management-in-exactly-35313%2ES%2E66419021?qid=e07db146-e26b-4f49-b0a5-a2b1a80efdb1&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_3531 There are lots of pithy definitions. But its interesting to analyse the different views people have of project management. So far I’ve found: A Life Cycle View: E.g. “Initiating, Planning, Executing, M&C, Closing Projects” A Theme View, usually Planning [...]
Summer Silence
Summer is supposed to be a time of quiet reflection. Here at AFA my summer was a period of furious activity. We have developed and launched our MoP Practitioner Course. As always our aim is to go beyond the minimum you need to scrape through the exam and to provide real added value. Feedback from [...]
