Agile practitioners are thinking about Agile in the Enterprise and Prince2 practitioners are doing the same. On September 30th I attended Project Challenge and heard Donnie MacNicol from Team Animation delivering a fantastic presentation on work he has done in collaboration with Andy Murray called ‘Beyond Prince2′. They have defined components for project success, which are:

Perspectives

1. Individual
2. Project Team
3. Organisation

Competencies

1. Technical
2. Behavioural
3. Contextual

They assessed Prince2 in each of these components. For example, from the individal perspective, how does Prince2 address Technical competency? How does it address Behavioural competency? Contextual? etc.

What they found was that Prince2 addresses the Technical competencies for the Individual and the Team very well. Ie., we all focus on ‘doing projects right’. The areas that are not addressed very well by Prince2 are the Behavioral Competence in the Organisation, and Contextual Competence in the Organisation. To elaborate, MacNicol and Murray identify the symptoms where the there are ‘issues’ in Contextual Competence in the Organisation.

• Sector focus is incorrect
• No higher level support
• Fighting against the organisation to deliver the project

Sound familiar? They also suggest some solutions which sound pretty sound. Let me know if you want me to share them! (A bit of a test to see if anyone is out there…:-))

So, just as Agile practitioners are considering how to scale from the Team and Individual to the Enterprise, so are the Prince2 practitioners. As someone who uses both methodologies I find this very exciting as we are all now on the cusp of Second Generation of Project Management which is still a new profession, relatively speaking.

They also included a thought-provoking quote and I’ll reproduce it here for you to consider:

‘For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong’ H. L Mencken

Tags: Agile, News, Project Management

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