Case Studies

A large county council, with diverse urban and rural responsibilities recognised that to gain the full benefits of PRINCE2, not only did staff require training but they also required additional coaching to succeed with maximum skills transfer. Mary Andrew takes up the story.

Training staff to use PRINCE2 is now straightforward, implementing PRINCE2 is more complex but still sits comfortably as a project; time bounded and with clearly understandable deliverables. Embedding PRINCE2 is much more complex, once staff are trained, how can the skills of project management using PRINCE2 be consolidated?

They recognised that embedding PRINCE2 needed more than a handbook and training courses. Having used AFA to initially implement PRINCE2, they released an innovative call off contract with AFA whereby AFA consultants were made available to selected project mangers for up to one day a month. The mentoring could be on-site or remotely and was mainly used to review management products before they were submitted to the Project Board.

Furthermore the AFA consultants also provided a confidential Business Assurance Report to Project Boards that helped them appreciate how PRINCE2 could facilitate direction of their projects. At the end of project the same consultants could be used to conduct Post Project Reviews.

After a few months of mentoring, the newly trained project managers had gained sufficient experience of applying PRINCE2 to no longer need mentoring and the resources were transferred to more junior project managers that had recently completed training.

The mentoring was initially funded centrally, but with experience, was built into project budgets as a way of ensuring project delivery within tolerance.

To learn more about AFA PRINCE2 training, visit the PRINCE2 Training page or contact our training team.