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To take Bill Clinton strategist James Carville’s famous quotation and apply it to the world of project management: “It’s the benefits and value, stupid!” But as Dr. Harold Kerzner of IIL revealed in a recent AXELOS webinar , 70% of companies fail to achieve the bene...

A project doesn’t end with delivery but with the realization of its benefits to the business. So why is corporate strategy still not being fully communicated to the project team and what steps need to be taken to ensure that it is? Without a clear understanding of corpora...

For many project managers, their role in Benefits Realization is viewed as 'not my job' or out of scope for their role. This attitude will be the death of the 'old school' project manager in a world that is much more socially conscious and holds people accountable for the...

What is effective project and programme governance and why is it important to define and establish governance arrangements for success and the realization of benefits? T he focus of many organizations , particularly in the public sector, is how to reduce the cost of opera...

Are you getting the very best from your PRINCE2 ® best practice knowledge? Sometimes, it’s useful to have a handy reminder of the key points you need to think about at any stage in a PRINCE2 project. My AXELOS has created a series of templates covering the bre...

ITIL ® and ISO/IEC 20000, the international standard for service management, have enjoyed a long and mutually supportive relationship. ISO/IEC 20000 is currently being revised for the third time, with an increased focus on Service Integration (SIAM), governance and manag...

Sue Taylor examines the importance of the blueprint in programmes and within AXELOS’ Managing Successful Programmes (MSP ® ) best practice guidance. By implementing change through a programme , an organization is trying to achieve a better future. That starts with a pr...

With continuing digital disruption, customer-focused organizations today more than ever need a portfolio-centred approach to both strategic planning and product delivery. An effective P3O model for any organization therefore seeks to build on, and better coordinate, the cont...

AXELOS’ research project – The Future Project Management Professional – found that project managers’ roles will evolve to become more strategic within their organizations. In fact, 90% recognized the need for a much stronger strategic vision that aligns with the overa...

The discipline of project management is evolving rapidly, but what does this mean for the project manager? Lisa Hodges, principal consultant at Cornerstone Service Management, explains why the future belongs to project manager 2.0. At a recent conference one of my fello...

In the world of best practice frameworks there is a risk that people jump on the latest thing, believing a particular framework is the answer to all their problems. As a species it seems we chase the one, universal quick-fix that doesn’t exist! As an expert who’s been worki...

Digital transformation offers organizations the potential to compete, stay relevant and reduce the cost of delivering services to customers and running business processes. IT service management (ITSM) provides a structured process, approach and common language along wit...

Ongoing measurement of project progress is vital. In the simplest terms, it tells you how much work has been done and what is left to do. However, in certain instances it tends only to be treated as vital when something on the project goes wrong; and only then will you hear ...

Steven Deneir – a project, programme and portfolio management trainer and coach with 20+ years’ experience – highlights his top four tips to agile project management success and reiterates the importance of ongoing learning and certification in approaches such as PRINCE2 ®...

Complex projects are characterized by a huge variety of inputs and this creates a challenging environment in which to make decisions. As human beings, we are naturally biased and often go on “gut feel”. This is fine if you are being chased by a lion, but in the complex worl...

Before we begin, let's define what culture is. Culture is a pattern of responses discovered, developed or invented during a group's history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment. These responses are consid...

Lessons learned is part of the PRINCE2 ® method and is there to save time, energy, effort and the cost of making the same mistakes on another project. For example, if you’ve been in a situation before with managing stakeholders and you know how to work with them it’s ...

My AXELOS is the new, online content subscription service to help you take control of your skills development and career in project, programme and IT service management. In a recent webinar AXELOS’ head of Professional Development, Amrit Saroya, and Global Marketing...

Good P3O governance is about ensuring that all key stakeholders have a clear understanding of the portfolio, programme and project boards that are focused on 'changing the business' and how it aligns to the corporate governance structure that is focused on 'running the busine...

Scott Harberd shares his experience of implementing PPM software during a period of transformation and change for one of the UK’s largest airlines. Following a period of rapid growth and promotion to the FTSE 100, the organization was outwardly successful but highly i...

Which partnership has the most influence on a project’s success ? Though it may not be top of your list, the one between project manager and sponsor (SRO) is arguably the most critical. A positive working relationship between these two roles will help keep the project on tr...

The space in between people managing and operating IT services and those that build and deliver IT products could be called the great divide. Among developers, the thinking can - sometimes - be based on the principles of "build it and hand it over". The big issue is that the...

In our latest blog post looking at PRINCE2 ® best practice , Fiona Magee explains why the real value of the PID template is realized only if approached with the right mindset. The complete set of PRINCE2 templates covering all key business activities is available via...

Rarely does an organization design its project management method from scratch. Instead it needs to be aware of the standards, best practice methods and bodies of knowledge related to project management (e.g. BS 6079 , PRINCE2 ® , PMI’s PMBOK ® and APM’s Body of Knowle...

This will be the final post from my time here at Agile 2018 . It’s been a packed week yet in the same breath I only feel like I have scratched the surface of the content on offer. I want to end this little series by sharing a couple of thoughts from the last day, but also de...

After an absence of several years, veteran project manager John Earwood has returned to his roots and is re-taking project and programme management qualifications. Here, he reflects on how far project management has come. Before PRINCE2® was introduced, project management ...

Is there room in today’s organizations for both AXELOS’ PRINCE2 ® method and PMI’s IPECC (Initiating, Planning, Executing, [Monitoring and] Controlling, Closing)* framework described in the PMBOK ® Guide ? While PMI* provides an excellent framework for the management ...

As some of you may know, this week I’m attending the Agile Alliance conference, Agile 2018 in San Diego. The event run by the Scrum Alliance brings together many of the leading thinkers on everything agile for a whole week of talks, discussions and much more. For my part, I...

And just like that, we’re done with Day 3 of Agile 2018 ! I’m hoping that by now any readers are aware of the previous two posts about days 1 and 2, but if not...here they are: Day 1 Day 2 The last hurrah - final thoughts from Agile 2018 The focus of the po...

The PMO has evolved from a mainly admin/support function into an exciting career space – so how can today’s practitioners successfully navigate the different opportunities on offer? PMO is becoming increasingly popular as an organizational entity around project management...

Q: When is an iceberg not just a large block of ice that can sink ships? A: When it’s the hidden iceberg of attitude, behaviour and culture that stops an organization getting the full benefit from implementing ITIL ® . For example, a large European bank had adopted ...

At AXELOS, we like to explore new ways of working, as well as new ways of learning. One such way is experiential learning (or ‘learning by doing’ as it’s more colloquially known). Earlier this year, Paul Wilkinson from GamingWorks proposed running the Grab@Pizza simulation...

When organizations are not managing projects effectively, it means the value that should be delivered by projects suffers. I believe this happens in a multitude of industries, and it is impacting businesses’ bottom lines. The solution is for organizations to recognize the b...

I n recent years Romania and, more broadly, South East Europe have become a hotbed for international IT services. Due to the region’s Internet of Everything approach, the IT market is booming and facilities like Security Operations Centres (SOCs) and Network Operation Centres...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Robin presented a session on ITSM Challenges and Training Benefits . Watch the video and read her new blog post also discussing how the right training can help organization meet IT Service Management (ITSM) challenges. ...

PRINCE2 training, as with any new learning experience, yields a lot of new information for Project Managers to learn, and breaking that information down into smaller chunks can make understanding it a lot easier. So, with the textbook in mind, here are some of the most co...

The customer interface is the place where an organization meets its customers but in ITSM it’s something no one talks about enough, even though it adds so much value. In today’s economy, businesses revolve around the service experience: take the upmarket coffee house concept...

Daniel Breston shares his thoughts on why it’s a misconception that ITIL is incompatible with other practices: Practices such as lean, agile and DevOps can’t be successful without ITIL . Each of them needs to go from idea to realization, be supported in operations a...

Ten years ago, IT in India was a very different world to now: the country was the “back office” of the world, providing outsourced services in the form of Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). During this period ITIL ® was the...

My view is that companies in 2017 really started discovering that one IT service management (ITSM) solution doesn’t fit all and they need a broader perspective, with different tools for different challenges. This means not only getting more frameworks and models to sit tog...

All PRINCE2 ® project, MSP ® programme and MoP ® portfolio governance bodies want updates on how well initiatives are progressing. To do this, management dashboards are a useful tool. MSP programmes aim to realize benefits resulting from changes in organizati...

I read an interesting comment by AXELOS Head of ITSM Kaimar Karu that “…the ITIL of the future is from practitioners, for practitioners.” As a result, I keenly awaited the release of the ITIL ® Practitioner Guidance so that I could use it to assess and improve my ITIL prac...

Just because you can connect a device to the internet doesn't mean you should. While connected devices (commonly called the “Internet of Things”) can deliver new services, there needs to be security, privacy and clear ownership of data. The endgame for the Internet of ...

When I analyze the tangible results my organization has achieved as a result of employees being ITIL ® competent, the return is undeniable. The benefits of ITIL training are threefold: differentiation, service improvement and cost saving. Differentiation In 2012, lev...

How can a system like ITIL® - forged in a year of seismic historical change 25 years ago - still be relevant to the world of ITSM today? Leaving aside the shift in information technology since 1989, the global changes in that year alone tell us how different the world was ba...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Hitesh presented a session on ITIL Practitioner and Service Design Roles . Watch the video and read his new blog post discussing the roles that can successfully benefit from adopting ITIL Practitioner. What is ITIL Pract...

From medical, banking and automotive, to retail and hospitality, ITIL ® best practice is being used in more and more industry sectors to improve business performance. Why is this happening? Because ITIL is a proven industry best practice that takes a holistic view of p...

What are the different approaches and benefits of programmes and projects in organizations? Rajiv Khanna assesses the differences and how the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP ® ) and PRINCE2 ® project management best practice principles and certifications can help. ...

Project management is under pressure – and organizations aren’t doing enough to get the most value from it. According to AXELOS’s PPM Benchmark Study 2017 – The Value of Project Management Excellence, about three-quarters of project managers are facing the dual challe...

Having spent an early part of his career in a business relationship management role as a Government IT Service Management (ITSM) contractor supporting NASA, Adam McCullough understands the purpose and value of Business Relationship Managers (BRMs) within organizations. In th...