Managing Successful Programmes

I spent half a day earlier this week at the Best Practice User Group Congress. BPUG is concerned with the application and use of OGC products such as Prince2, MSP and MoR. As you might expect therefore there was little mention of alternative methods such as Agile.

I didn’t have time to attend the conference sessions, so this is somewhat less than a full review: I did however take part in one round-table session and had a chance to speak to a number of vendors at the exhibition.

“Simple, not Easy”, hosted by Adrian Dooley from The Projects Group was advertised as seeking “… to identify the fundamentals behind the evermore contrived solutions for consistently delivering successful projects”.

I’m not sure we achieved that in 90 minutes, crammed into a room that showed an artful ability on behalf of the hotel to turn a fire escape corridor into a meeting space (!!), but there was some entertaining discussion, capped by Adrian’s takeaway – “Practice what you preach” – i.e. as professionals in achieving business change it’s down to all of us to address the business changes needed to make project management more effective in the organisations we work with.

There was a small exhibition area with a number of vendors of software, consultancy and training. Ones which caught my eye were:

• Change Director
• PAT from NinthWave
• RiskAid from Risk Reasoning

I’d have liked to take a look at Simply Project Office from Mundane Software, but sadly they seemed to suffer from the mundane problem of having no-one on the stand when I looked!

I’m planning to attend Agile Approaches for Delivering Business Value next week.

It looks like an interesting set of sessions, and although I doubt I’ll be liveblogging, I aim to post some notes here as soon afterwards as I can.

I’m particularly interested in two of the talks on the second day:

“A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Agile and fixed-price contracts” by Duncan Pierce;

“When XP Met Outsourcing” by Angela Martin.

In my current environment almost all our systems development is carried out by suppliers in various contractual models, and I’ve hit some frustrations in getting acceptance of Agile methods. I’m keen to learn how others may have constructed a “win-win” in this sort of situation.

(cross-posted on main blog)