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If you want to successfully deliver new products and services to keep your organization competitive in today’s changing world, effective project management is critical. The project management method, PRINCE2 ® , has been taken up by more than 150 countries and, by its prov...

PRINCE2 Agile is long overdue. Though I’ve already been using PRINCE2® as a “wrapper” around agile methods, the rise of agile – post the Agile Manifesto – in relation to traditional project management is now starting to reach a level of maturity. AXELOS has done a good job...

What does the world want to know about agile delivery methods and their place in PRINCE2 Agile best practice? One of the easiest ways to find out is to ask the world using that most instant of communications tools, Twitter. And so AXELOS – including Allan Thomson, our...

When PRINCE2 Agile ® first arrived on the market in 2015, it explicitly addressed a deep-rooted misunderstanding . It challenged the assumption that PRINCE2 ® should be used to facilitate project delivery solely through a Waterfall process. But this focus on the Waterfall ...

In this first blog post, Julia Gosse considers organizations and their staff that have already adopted PRINCE2 ® : What challenges do PRINCE2 practitioners and their employers face with the concept of agile project delivery ? The biggest challenge is that the term “agile...

PRINCE2 Agile is the vital next step in project management; not because PRINCE2® wasn’t already agile which, in my opinion, it was, but more because the agile movement has grown rapidly. The agile arena has simply developed so dramatically that it’s now become essential for s...

For those waiting to hear, or wondering, about progress regarding the development of PRINCE2 Agile : please be assured, your wait is nearly over! Having harnessed a highly diverse set of opinions from within the working group, the new best practice guidance, which will blen...

Developing materials for PRINCE2 Agile is a true milestone in the evolution of PRINCE2®. It’s the first extension to the PRINCE2 core qualification and is based on end user feedback; we’ve listened to practitioners and organizations to understand what they need, which is ulti...

PRINCE2 Agile ® arguably offers the best of both worlds, so why aren’t more Agile practitioners embracing this collaborative approach?  In the past five years or so, I’ve seen a growing recognition within the Agile community that controls, governance and oversight are...

It is only a month since the launch of PRINCE2 Agile and all of the hard work put in over the last year has turned to relief and excitement. A bit like cyclist Chris Froome going up Alpe d’Huez the other day in the Tour de France – it may be hard work during the ascent, ...

Following the launch of PRINCE2 Agile Foundation certification earlier this year, we caught up with members of the alumni for their feedback. Here, Shane Keown of Valtech UK – who took the course through Logical Model – explains what he learned from the experience. Wha...

While Scrum has become the standard for agile software product development, many Scrum users are demanding a kind of umbrella for managing more complex projects where more than one team is involved. Similarly, many “well-established” Project Managers would like to know the ...

PRINCE2 Practitioner training and how it has evolved It’s been a while since I first discovered PRINCE2 Agile™ I was part of a delivery team that I had just joined in a technical/development role and we were implementing a new DBMS (database management system) and data ware...

The two worlds of PRINCE2 project management and agile have just become a lot more interesting: AXELOS is developing new guidance to bring the best of PRINCE2 and agile together for the benefit of practitioners everywhere irrespective of which side of the fence they come fro...

Over the past 30 years numerous methods, practices, and certifications gained prominence across the global IT community. As the numbers grew, so too did the tendency to promote specific practices and methodologies at the expense of other legitimate and relevant ones as all of...

What do individual people know about using agile delivery methods for projects that organizations don’t? According to AXELOS’ 2016 PRINCE2 ® Report , individuals are embracing agile methods more than organizations: 81% in a sample of 2,400 see the value of working in an ag...

Improving an organization’s agile capability can take many forms: It can involve training people in product-focused frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban, or project-focused frameworks such as PRINCE2 Agile™ and AgilePM/DSDM. Along with this it can include coaching and men...

It was the marriage they said could never happen but AXELOS has managed it. What were thought to be two polar opposites, PRINCE2 - symbolizing control, accountability, order – and agile – symbolizing self-organization and equality, have been reconciled in the new PRINCE2 Ag...

It is often supposed that agile and PRINCE2® conflict directly with each other and cannot be used effectively together. The basis of this view is that PRINCE2 is ‘process-heavy’, while agile is ‘process-light’; in reality, both processes are highly configurable and PRINC...

PRINCE2 is often taken as synonymous with the term “waterfall”. That’s a mistake with a number of implications. The truth is you can use it in a waterfall way but it’s not intrinsically waterfall; the main idea is to deliver profit and products for your business. Yet prac...

How agile is project management in 2017? Our latest PPM Benchmark Study suggests a discrepancy between project managers and the organizations they work for in the way agile is perceived and adopted. The majority of project managers continue to be enthusiastic about agil...

A recurring challenge in large organizations is the lack of trust among practitioners, teams and people that are using different methodologies. Many “agilists” use language that non-agile trained people don’t understand which can lead to distrust within a business and in te...

Delivering the right thing, in the right way and at the right time to ensure maximum return on investment isn’t easy. However, by ‘adjusting the controls’ within the principles and themes of PRINCE2® we have found a more responsive, agile, way of working that’s delivering si...

Make no mistake about it - blending PRINCE2® and agile is a big deal. And as we approach the threshold of a PRINCE2 and agile marriage, it's clear to see that we've come a long way since 2007 when I first questioned how the two could feasibly come together. Back then, when...

In this second of a two-part blog post series based on AXELOS’ recent research, The Future Project Manager , consultant trainers Duncan Wade and David Hinde explore agile in project management and how it aligns with a strategic approach: While the term “agile” is becom...

Agile delivery principles are increasingly attracting the attention of organizations looking for the most appropriate approach to help meet their project objectives. But, buyer beware! Agile methods alone may not supply sufficient control within projects to ensure they are ...

There’s a need for using a blend of best practice methodologies, but also a risk. The risk is that the elements of the final system might not be consistent with each other. It happens when people pick elements from multiple systems just because they seem interesting without p...

The quick-to-market digital environment of today means organizations have to find a way to incorporate agile working in what they do. Take-up of agile remains a mixed bag and we should acknowledge that agile isn’t for everyone or everything. However, where the feeling t...

The focus on tailoring in the PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update is about taking only what you and your project need to ensure the right approaches are in place for success. This idea of cutting the best practice guidance down to the size you require is a crucial and useful change to...

A perfect storm of circumstances in UK public sector project management is helping open the door to agile methods. First, some projects have not been as successful as expected - either not delivering a product or not meeting stakeholder expectations. Combining those issues w...

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 ®...

PRINCE2 terminology can be a real bugbear for agile practitioners; they see it as being too prescriptive and inflexible. However, there are many PRINCE2 terms that reflect agile approaches. Here, we provide one example from each of the five PRINCE2 elements: 1.  Initiation:...

What is a key difference between a traditional and an agile project manager ? You can recognize the latter today as someone more focused on facilitating and supporting a team. For example, a traditional project manager would expect to present an estimated project bu...

As a PRINCE2 ® consultant, trainer and practitioner, what do I think of the PRINCE2 2017 Update ? Not wishing to be contrary but it’s great that PRINCE2 has a changed a lot, while remaining the same. What I mean is that the good things about PRINCE2 are still there wh...

The use of agile delivery to deliver large scale digital programmes is now is at previously unknown levels of maturity. In fact, it has got to the point where I can’t think of a serious web development team not using some kind of agile method. Equally, it’s difficult to imag...

It may seem at odds with purist Agile thinking, but project managers are increasingly finding themselves allocated Agile projects. This trend is partly because Agile projects have become the norm rather than the exception in a number of disciplines, such as IT, where digit...

A key focus of the PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update is to make it easier for individuals and organizations to adopt and tailor the world’s most-practised project management method. I’ve been helping organizations adopt and tailor PRINCE2 for over fifteen years. In truth PRINCE2 ...

How can organizations and their programme managers ensure agile approaches and programme management work well together in 2017? This is a hot topic right now, with a rapidly-evolving technology landscape which lends itself to agile techniques and the pressure on organizatio...

Any discussion of project management in the USA demands the question: “how well are we doing?” I’d like to say that Project Managers are doing a good job in delivering projects on time and within budget along with all the scope and quality the customer expects. However, th...

We’re living in an environment where most organizations will need agile practices – methods, projects and DevOps – in order to respond to the market. Equally, most organizations still have to run some projects with a more traditional and methodical approach; that means oper...

The PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update arrives as organizations around the world are on a maturity curve towards achieving consistency, greater efficiencies and cost savings. This has led to a growth in organizations developing their own approaches to delivering projects based on sta...

Organizations and professionals are facing an ever-changing world in which consumers are forcing faster responses to their demands. At the same time, there are internal tensions between the delivery team seeking to fulfil this demand versus the corporate teams they interact w...

As a PRINCE2 ® -qualified project manager, I’ve tailored every project I’ve ever worked on. That’s why it’s great to see that the principle of tailoring runs explicitly throughout the updated PRINCE2 guidance and how it can be tailored for projects in any environment: smal...

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...

Agile  is fast becoming the ‘must-have’ methodology requested by many operations directors… something that may be more the result of an impulse purchase in an airport waiting lounge bookshop than coming from a deep understanding of the topic. That said, I must admit that le...

Mike Babb, who is responsible for recruitment into Capita’s 4,500-strong professional services division, gives his verdict on the PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update: Since qualifying in PRINCE2 six years ago I’ve witnessed at first hand the importance of tailoring the project mana...

Can you be both agile and strategic in project management? Based on our recent research, The Future Project Manager , AXELOS invited consultant trainers Duncan Wade and David Hinde to explore the debate in this first part of a two-part blog post series: Project managers...

Rameez Chikhalia, Commercial Analyst at AXELOS describes how PRINCE2 can help finance teams improve communication and collaborative working. What’s your role within the Finance team? I work in the Finance team at AXELOS, providing support in two key areas. Initially, my...

The 2017 update to PRINCE2 ® has brought the best practice guidance up-to-date with new ways of working and thinking. Remaining current is, I believe, critical for something that has grown and become the industry standard through its flexibility and suitability to any pr...

Hannah Mason, project manager at Octopus Group, recently studied and certified in the latest versions of PRINCE2 ® Foundation and Practitioner. Here, she talks about the newly-updated certifications and how PRINCE2 helps her day-to-day work. Certifying in PRINCE2 has...

What is the current state of project management and Project Managers? At the turn of 2016, PM Perspectives Blog - in its top 10 project management trends post - said: “Project management is no longer boxed away in a corner of the room. It stands front and centre and is b...

PRINCE2 ® can, and should, be “tailored”. That means being flexible in your use of PRINCE2 when delivering projects rather than applying the method rigidly. Unfortunately, this is something many people have struggled to grasp about PRINCE2 and, as a result, shy away from us...

Are you a person who wants to get things done and be successful but lacks the time to make big changes or to start anything complex and new? Based on PRINCE2 ® processes, though taking a more lightweight approach, we have created a brief, practical guidance paper using...

There are, as you may know, a few key differences between agile and traditional waterfall projects, when managed using PRINCE2® . Traditional waterfall projects are delivered sequentially, whereas agile projects tend to be iterative and incremental. Traditional project p...

In this, the first of a series of blogs on the use of PRINCE2 outside of traditional project management roles, we speak to Dan Verghese, Head of Digital at AXELOS, on how the guidance helps in the management of digital projects. How have you used PRINCE2 during your caree...

PRINCE2 gives you a structured approach to delivering something , regardless of what that something is. And it’s effective not only for professionals with “Project Manager” in their job title: according to AXELOS’ PPM Survey 2016 , 88% of IT professionals, 82% of senio...

At first glance you might not think AXELOS’ latest best practice certifications – PRINCE2 Agile ® , RESILIA ™ and ITIL ® Practitioner – have very much in common. However, there is a shared thread running through each that can have a real impact on organizational...

When considering your ability to deliver projects, programmes and manage portfolios, you should always consider things from an organizational perspective first. Sounds obvious, right? Though this thinking is not new, it has been gaining a lot more traction in recent yea...

What if you were waking up every day to PRINCE2 ® training as if it were a morning workout, getting you into top project management shape? Well, that’s how some describe the experience of a PRINCE2 daily email course. It started almost two years ago when Management...

According to the Project Management Institute , ineffective communication leads to project failure one third of the time and compromises the project’s budget half the time. I always go by this mantra: people deliver projects not processes and tools . In order to emphasize...

How do you prepare your organization for an agile project? Naturally, this depends on the project; but if it’s a major technology project with a digital outcome , then using agile methods will probably be a significant shift for your organization.  Where your organizationa...

How true to life are the so-called projects being managed by the so-called Project Manager on The Apprentice? What problems do they encounter and how do they deal with them? How should they be dealt with and how would the PRINCE2 Agile ® guidance handle things? The seri...

A new year often brings transition and new beginnings. And, in that spirit, we are bringing you a new PRINCE2 ® . Though the existing PRINCE2 is fundamentally sound – and has become the world’s most practised project management method – we have reached a tipping point a...

Finishing a project on time can seem like something of a rarity in the world of project management so it seems fair to question if finishing on time is even important at all? But the thing is, finishing when we said we would is very important because the pace of change in in...

Having had the opportunity to review the new PRINCE2 ® 2017 (draft) manual, and as someone who sat the first PRINCE2 2017 (trainer only) examinations – what are my impressions? Firstly, it’s still the PRINCE2 we know and love... but better! Let’s start with a little bit...

How effective and successful is the practice of project management in the United States right now? Cards on the table – it’s completely variable; the capability of projects is driven by the experience level of Project Managers and their familiarity with project approaches. C...

Those familiar with Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2® will know that the value of the universal, process-based project management method is that it can be applied to any project regardless of  type, organization, geography or culture. It can be used for any project...

Why should IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals care about agile delivery of technology services? With the business world changing rapidly under our feet, being agile allows rapid response to those changes in a timely manner and shifts your organization in the right d...

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...

Since good governance is about the processes for making and implementing decisions, then effective governance and accountability structures are vital particularly if organizations are to successfully use an agile approach to deliver business change through the investment of p...

Herding Cats with PRINCE2 ® Let me introduce myself - I’m Tom, a Project Manager. I recently started in my new role and my team are… well, they are a little hairier than I first expected. And when the job description said strong stakeholder management, I didn’t realize this...

It’s fashionable to convey confidence in a standpoint or outcome by incorporating the phrase “100 percent”. If I gave such an absolute level of assurance when managing a project, I suspect my customers would soon become disillusioned with me as I have never delivered 100% o...

According to AXELOS’ Future Project Management Professional research, the project managers of tomorrow will need to embrace a wider range of skills and become even more multi-faceted. Project manager, Ana Bertacchini considers the implications for the profession. How wil...

This first, full operating year for AXELOS has been an incredible journey and I would like to thank everyone who has been involved. We’ve built a company and a team and, importantly, we’ve done it all collaboratively by listening to ITSM, project and programme and cyber res...

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...

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 ...

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...

Why should professionals who have any level of responsibility for projects in their organizations look to approaches like PRINCE2 ® and others for help? Paul Bradley, MD of SPOCE Project Management, shares his view: Many people are involved in project management wit...

Now that the dust has settled and the challenge is over, AXELOS Community is proud to announce the winners of The Great Agile Challenge. We’d like to thank everyone that participated in the challenge and we look forward to discussing all things best practice with you in futu...

Project management and IT Service Management (ITSM) are evolving and, as a result, are becoming more interlinked. The reason for their entwinement is simple: it’s part of a move from ‘traditional’ project management approaches that focus on producing a deliverable to a more...

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...

Continuing her series on the Most Common Questions from PRINCE2 Foundation Training , Lead Trainer Michelle Rowland addresses some of the most frequently asked questions from Chapters 7 through to 10 of the PRINCE2 textbook . Chapter 7 Why do we have three level...

A well-designed project and stage plan was once the pride of any successful project manager. In the post-waterfall era of agile everything, the humble project and stage plan has got itself a bit of a bad reputation for being excessive. However, effective project management st...

In the past 30 years the Northern Ireland Civil Service has seen an increased focus on delivering change and less on “business as usual” activity. This demand for improved public services has changed the way these services are delivered and that requires a much more robust a...

Recruitment in the project management market in mid-2018 finds itself in between times: the recessionary economy of post-2008 and an emerging state of recovery. The relatively high availability of people during recessionary periods means employers don’t have to try too har...

The need for speed has reached boiling point in IT service management (ITSM). Organizations’ ability to react to this in 2018 – especially in ITSM – will be the difference between surviving and thriving or withering and being outsourced. Those that have already adopted b...

Project management in North America has a long way to go to fulfil its potential. This is partly because there are many notions about what project management is and partly because a proportion of people involved in project management are giving their abilities more credit th...

Is Agile IT Service Management (ITSM) an official term and is there a body of knowledge behind it? The simplest answer is not really. I have seen this term several times over the past few years, but never dug into it until I realized that we need more agility in the current...

Using AXELOS’ best practice for programme management - MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) - can come in useful in the most unexpected situations - even beyond the workplace. Several years ago, I became involved in a local parents’ campaign about the lack of secondary ...

The way big businesses are applying Agile methodology has seen a distinct shift. Where once Scrum was limited to team frameworks, it’s now being used at a much broader programme and portfolio level by the likes of Google, Apple and Spotify. Why? Because these large organi...

Jane Nichols, COO of CITI, explores the concept of "learn faster, learn smarter" for people either studying best practices such as PRINCE2 ® to obtain a certification or qualified people continuing their professional development journey. People studying best practi...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme , experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your skills and kno...

The world is changing faster than ever and so organizations are experiencing more changes more often, with every change having an impact on something. To effectively implement all but the simplest of changes, managers need to be able to understand and manage projects, no mat...

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...

More and more organizations are finding a need for their employees to have project management knowledge because the work people do is increasingly project-based. Not only that, but as the world becomes more complex and advances in technology are made every day, project acti...

If your key stakeholders and end users aren’t happy, nobody’s happy. Key stakeholders can make or break the success of a project, even if all the deliverables are met and the objectives are satisfied . I was thinking recently about what added value I bring to the success ...

The principal objective for a project – delivering a specific output – can often be relegated to a focus on standardization. And very often this standardization of the project management processes boils down to completing a set of project templates. I’ve seen this happen very...

Organizational transformation is built on ITIL ® best practices. And, from what I’ve seen from the frontline, the need for this still exists. In fact, there is so much work still to be accomplished among organizations that I could be busy for years and years! As a consul...

When summing up project management in 2017, one word dominates: convergence. Convergence has been happening for a while and is founded on having a common understanding of project management and its underlying concepts. For example, if everyone involved in the project shar...

The importance of effective communication with a project’s stakeholders is something that shouldn’t be overlooked. PRINCE2 ® describes detailed techniques only when related to one of its recommended approaches or one that is unique to its method. As a result, it does no...

If your organization doesn’t change it will probably do one thing: atrophy. It’s not sustainable to remain the same - do that, and you’re writing your own obituary. Like it or not, change happens. The world, people and technology change and organizations need to maintain th...

Agile is such a hot topic at the moment with clear recognition that agile approaches are increasingly important to fast-paced, organizational change. It’s definitely up there as important to the future of the project management profession and the people in it. Project...

How agile are we in IT service management (ITSM)? I’ve seen numerous different companies claiming to be agile while – in reality – they’re not. If we refer for a moment to the ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI) model, the first step is to define the vision and prop...

Many organizations go into Agile assuming it to be a “silver bullet” for numerous business management issues. Managers may have attended conferences or read articles where forward thinking companies, such as Amazon, Netflix or Toyota, are held up as positive case studies. ...

As more and more people turn to Agile frameworks over traditional project management methodologies to help enhance project capabilities and deliver outputs, it’s important to highlight that Agile is not a panacea for poor project management. At this point, let's distinguish b...

Obtaining an IT Service Management (ITSM) certification such as ITIL ® Foundation always requires an investment of time and money and begs the question: is it worth it? ITIL Foundation gives you the opportunity to put theory into practice immediately. This is important a...

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...

With Day 2 of Agile 2018 come and gone, as promised here are my top thoughts from the day. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’d highly recommend my recap of the first day . Today has had a common theme running throughout (bar one exception) of how to scale agi...

Services are about people and processes and how technology enables the service delivery. These services need service management and, as a product manager, it has been useful to recognize that designing services is different to designing products. In order to deliver a cons...

Project management is all about risk management. Risk management is the key that helps you predict the future and have things ready in your “back pocket” to “fight fires”. However, you can extinguish only one “fire” at a time so risk management helps you spot the pos...

AXELOS’ Future ITSM Professional report predicts a growing need for people working in ITSM to adopt a more strategic role as service management principles spread beyond IT and throughout organizations. Service management consultant, Lisa Hodges, reflects on the findings: ...

Understanding the difference When looking at outputs and outcomes it is important that IT service management (ITSM) professionals understand the difference; all too often we focus only on our outputs and the processes rather than thinking about the outcome and what we are ac...

The worlds of IT and ITSM have been suffering something of a Mark Twain syndrome lately: reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated. Even worse than that, they’ve been subject to unnecessary hype along the lines of “the IT Department is dead, ITIL is dead, DevOps i...

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...

During December 2016, AXELOS Community asked you what best practice would look like in the year 2030, and you answered. We now proudly present the winners and highlights of the week. If your name is listed in the infographic below, we’ll be in touch shortly with information o...

30 years ago in the manufacturing industry, if you brought out a new product you may have had between three and nine months before your main competitors would catch on and create something to challenge you. Now, in a digitally-led market, you can often count your time of exc...

It’s a pivotal and exciting moment for the service desk. For those still struggling with their traditional IT service desks that might sound like an odd statement, but significant change is coming. Historically, the service desk’s primary role has been a help desk for when ...

PRINCE2 is one of the world’s most popular project management methodologies, so congratulations if you’re studying to take the Foundation exam; having the PRINCE2 certification will prepare you well for job roles both within and outside the world of project management. But b...

Traditionally, ITSM has not been agile. People have tended to focus more on having robust processes and rather than considering “what do we need?”, they have asked “what more can we put in to processes ?”. This level of “over-control” has happened because of over-enginee...

Services are about people and processes and how technology enables the service delivery. These services need service management and, as a product manager, it has been useful to recognize that designing services is different to designing products. In order to deliver a cons...

The IT Service Management (ITSM) mindset in 2017 needs to shift, both culturally and in ways of working that are about breaking down barriers and silos. This means embracing agile service management and moving away from long-term projects of process and improvement. Yes, th...

Taking the MSP ® (Managing Successful Programmes) Practitioner exam puts you on a pathway to a proven best practice method for managing transformational change in organizations. Programmes are the delivery mechanism for this level of change, defining an organization’s f...

What’s the point of training people in project management best practices and then not using their new-found skills? Clearly, there is no point; however, this seems to be an issue among organizations according to the latest AXELOS PPM Benchmark Study 2017 – The Value of Pro...

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...

What happens when you introduce the new PRINCE2 ® 2017 update to experts responsible for training and developing PRINCE2-certified project managers? It’s never easy to predict how people will respond when best practice guidance undergoes a change. So, we were keen to hear...

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...

It’s a natural response for many IT organizations to think about how implementing tools can be the solution to IT problems. But it’s a big problem, as there’s no magic pixie dust sprinkled over a tool and it can affect people negatively as much as positively. This issue ...

2017 was the year of the “lean IT” revolution, trying to bring frameworks together and figuring out how they can all play in the same sandpit. That means understanding how to get cohesion between the likes of ITIL ® , Agile, Six Sigma and COBIT in a way that adds value ...

Project management forms a part of portfolio management and in both there is currently a lot of talk about the issue of sustainability but not a lot of implementing sustainability in portfolio management. Organizations have strategic objectives that clarify what they want f...

The focus of the Project Manager today is more about delivering the right things: we’re now expected to be more involved with senior-level decisions and prove we’re delivering value. In 10 years’ blogging about the project management industry on GirlsGuideToPM.com I’ve ...

In the UK, the two popular project management methods, APMP and PRINCE2 ® , have divided opinions in the project management arena for years. Some project management practitioners will view one as being superior to the other and some employers similarly will have a prefere...

What can project managers do to improve their skills and capabilities and – in turn – the performance of project teams? Have a best practice mindset To be truly effective, you need to know your chosen project management method – such as PRINCE2 ® – in ...

PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update co-author, Robert Buttrick, looks at how the latest update of PRINCE2 helps organizations to design their own corporate project management and change approaches. While PRINCE2 can be used to run a single project, it can also be tailored by or...

Developing new applications with a combination of ITIL ® , DevOps and agile methods is transforming results for customers. While DevOps and agile are enabling better communication, improved analysis of customer needs and delivering a quality solution, ITIL adds incide...

Ulf Livoff, project manager and PRINCE2 ® trainer, has always had an interest in simulations and mathematical modelling. Having founded Inference Labs to develop learning simulators, he is now applying this interest to creating online PRINCE2 project environments which hel...

Many small companies and even departments in larger enterprises simply don’t have the need for a dedicated project manager and, more often than not, will appoint someone from within the business to run projects on a case-by-case basis. Selection is usually made on the gro...

In recent years there has been a profound shift in the pace and extent of change. The need to develop an appropriate response to that is the reason behind the development of AgileSHIFT ® – a guide to help prepare individuals and organizations for transformational shift by ...

2017 was certainly an interesting year for project management and 2018 looks set to be equally eventful. In a positive move for the industry, the Association for Project Management (APM) received its Royal Charter . This is a major step forward for the profession and tak...

If you’re intending to take the Practitioner qualification, a little groundwork while studying for the Foundation exam will pay dividends later on. The Manual The Practitioner exam is open book, meaning you can consult the manual during the exam. The only book you can take ...

Improving IT Service Management in 2015 For me the main issue with improving ITSM is that we often spend too much time contemplating our own navel instead of making things happen! As an industry we are very good at theorizing and discussing ideas both old and new, but makin...

Being “match-fit” for any examination takes plenty of advanced planning and preparation. By the time you’re taking your PRINCE2 ® 2009 Foundation exams, you should already be a veteran of exam techniques from experience at school, college and university. But even if you...

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...

Like their traditional counterparts, organizations that are struggling with Agile face the lack of executive involvement . Despite Agile’s success in addressing software development issues, it hasn’t addressed strategic leadership. This is where I believe the real issue i...

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 ...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme , experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your professional sk...

What has 2017 meant for project managers and what is coming around the corner in 2018? Karen Ferris of Macanta Consulting looks ahead to the challenges facing project managers and their organizations next year. The need to be both waterfall and agile in projects ha...

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 ...

Cyber security, today, is often very technology-based with a focus on technical issues such as firewalls and virus scanning software. While technology is an important part of the cyber defence, it is important not to neglect strategy in identifying what controls an organi...

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...

There have been many surprises at this year’s World Cup. Germany lost their first opener since 1982 – not a good start for the defending world champion. Argentina failed to beat the underdog Iceland and Japan triumphed over Colombia. As we have now reached the end of the gr...

Ed Lively is a senior consultant and senior trainer at the International Institute for Learning, an AXELOS Accredited Training Organization (ATO) headquartered in New York. Ed attended a free AXELOS PRINCE2 'Train the Trainer' session in January 2015 in Chicago where he unde...

What are the ITIL training questions that a tutor hears from trainees time and again? As a useful resource for all practitioners, I felt it was worth bringing the “usual suspects” of topics together in one place: What is an accreditor, an ATO and EI? AXELOS is the accredi...

How do you start a project using the PRINCE2 ® project management method? Mark Sutton, change manager and trainer, considers the steps: Starting up a project – according to PRINCE2 – is triggered by a mandate : a reason to do something or, in other words, a busin...

Projects fail for a number of reasons: while it’s dependent on the industries you are working in, there are some reasons that are more prolific than others. For example: Unclear scope and success criteria Lack of buy-in and engagement Lack of change management skills U...

For project managers everywhere - who now have the PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification firmly on their horizon for the first time - I have two words: "We listened!" You shared your frustrations with us about the historical process of moving up to PRINCE2 Practitioner level on...

The DevOps and Agile movements are putting increasing pressure on traditional approaches to IT Service Management (ITSM) as many organizations embrace new technology and become more and more cloud native . These concepts related to the movements are all about evaluating ...

Studying the risk management dimension of the RESILIA Foundation course will enable people to better understand what is a threat, a vulnerability and an asset in the context of cyber resilience and how they combine to create a risk to the business. One way to understand the...

What is currently a typical starting point when organizations are thinking about protection against cyber threat and how often is that the right place to start? Organizations can start from one of three places when thinking about protection against cyber threat: Strategic...

One element of PRINCE2 ® that I use on every project I’m involved with is product-based planning. This PRINCE2 technique is especially useful for putting a plan together which comprises the “shopping list” of the things that my project team needs to create to deliver...

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...

I was recently in Tokyo to meet with CIOs of Japanese businesses prior to the annual itSMF Japan conference. I was interested in asking these CIOs about their business and IT challenges, the skills they believed would be important, and their thoughts about ITIL ® and th...

In the final post in her series on the Most Common Questions from PRINCE2 Foundation Training , Lead Trainer Michelle Rowland addresses some of the most frequently asked questions from Chapters 11 through to 18 of the PRINCE2 textbook . Chapters 11 and 12 What ...

Recently, I have been lucky enough to attend some excellent events in the IT service management (ITSM) space. I have noticed some reoccurring themes running through the presentations and networking discussions, which was affirmed by the talks I attended at Pink17 . There a...

In Agile, Minimum Viable Bureaucracy (MVB) refers to a way of having just enough process to make things work, but not so much as to make it cumbersome particularly when applied to portfolio, programme and project direction, management and delivery practices. It’s about findin...

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...

Do you all have 15 July 2018 marked in your diary? If not then it’s high time because that is the day of the football final. We now know that France will play Croatia in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium  on Sunday and Adam our #PRINCE2PUNDIT  is already planning his big football p...

Passing the ITIL ® Practitioner certification is a significant achievement. It shows you can take the ITIL framework and adapt it to real-life situations. The following tips will improve your chance of passing your exam. Studying for the ITIL Practitioner exam and getting...

P3M3® v3.0 is – in the world of best practice guidance – the “big one”. This latest version, the newest since 2008, will provide PPM consultants and organizations they work with the evidence for whether projects, programmes and portfolios are working or not and their return ...

At an IT Service Management (ITSM) conference in 2016, the following equation caught my eye: “DevOps = Agile + Lean + ITSM”. In other words, DevOps is about good development practices continually delivering product features (Agile), effectively and with minimal wasted effort...

In the past year to 18 months, we’ve witnessed a real shift in IT Service Management (ITSM). For a long time, there’s been an emphasis on the importance of processes, technology and certifications but now, there’s a much greater awareness of the need to have new skills. S...

In 2017, people working in IT service management (ITSM) have shown a real openness to change and new ideas. There has always been a discussion that “a change is needed” in the ITSM world. Still a lot of initiatives have started and died unnoticed, or after a ton of negative...

When I first ‘discovered’ ITIL ® in the 1990s, it was both a revelation and like discovering a “family” I never knew I had. At that time, I loved that “family” because of how it took us where we needed to be. And it was needed because IT was largely run by people with ...

People wanting to progress their careers and make a difference in IT and IT service management (ITSM) roles need to concentrate on three major issues: their customer, the services they need, and the value they should be providing. Avoiding the sport of “framework hunting” i...

This week, AXELOS announced the launch of My AXELOS , an online content subscription aligned to some of the world’s most widely used project and service management frameworks, ITIL ® , PRINCE2 ® and MSP ® . Here, Emer O’Sullivan, Marketing Lead at AXELOS explains wh...

It is very common for organizations to ask project managers to deliver a plan for approval at short notice and this increases the risks for its delivery. What is rarely recognized is that a hastily-produced plan risks being incomplete, leading to delays, quality compromise...

Another day, another IT framework – or that’s how it could seem to IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioners in 2017. DevOps, digital transformation, BRM, SIAM and so on; all of them have relevance and good ideas; but we have to stop thinking that any one framework i...

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 ...

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. ...

What are the myths and realities about digital disruption? AXELOS attended the recent British Quality Foundation event, Digital Disruption – is it business as usual , and this is a summary of London Business School professor, Julian Birkinshaw’s analysis of current digi...

PRINCE2 ® is widely recognized for providing a method for successful project delivery. However, aspiring project managers need to consider their certification – any certification – as only part of the greater whole which provides an experienced and well-rounded pro...

1. In your service management experience, how much of a foundation does ITIL ® provide? ITIL is “documented common sense”, useful when undergoing any transformation as an organization. Having that ITIL tried-and-tested structure in place helps to lighten the load and mi...

Using and Developing IT Skills within the Organization Many organizations today are faced with the challenge of adopting cloud-based IT services, a move which may involve a significant transformation of IT infrastructure. One option is to adopt a private cloud model to lea...

What is IT4IT and who is it relevant for? AXELOS’ ITSM Portfolio Development Manager, Roman Zhuravlev and Anton Lykov, Solution Architect for Micro Focus, discussed the IT4IT architecture model in a recent AXELOS webinar and this blog post offers a brief summary of their dis...

Throughout the 25 years of its existence, ITIL has supported IT organizations in providing business value for their customers in the form of well-designed and supported services. ITIL has become the most widely used and most successful ITSM (IT Service Management) framework i...

Everyone’s favourite IT service management (ITSM) puppet blogger, Joe The IT Guy, published an article a couple of months ago on the alignment of ITIL ® and DevOps. It had some great insights, and Joe suggested that I pen a follow-up … so, here it is. Before I start, I’d...

While organizations might choose to flatten the hierarchy and decentralize decision making, everyone in the organization needs to step up and lead – especially in organizational change management (OCM) . Think for a moment about the Total Football concept pioneered by the ...

At the start of teaching ITIL ® Practitioner I tell candidates that the guidance will become the ‘most thumbed book’ in their arsenal. By the time they finish their training, they agree universally. The response to ITIL Practitioner has been resoundingly positive in ...

Marcel Foederer is part of the AXELOS Lead Architect Team (LAT), responsible for guiding this year’s ITIL update. In this blog post he looks both backwards and forwards, considering where ITIL has come from and where it’s going: How has ITIL ® changed in the past 20 ye...

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 received the Project Mandate in October 2016.  It was clear and concise. “Run the Bournemouth Half Marathon on 8 October 2017 and raise awareness and funds for Target Ovarian Cancer ” . Starting Up A Project process was triggered and I created the Project Brief. Th...

Dr Guy Brown is an academic in business, management and leadership with a background in designing and developing contemporary and vocational learning for companies and work-based learners. He leads Northumbria University London campus and works with organizations and profes...

One of the vital components of a successful Project and Programme Manager is leadership . Leadership capabilities are a key element of the behavioural competence among such professionals and, indeed, a Project or Programme Manager is someone people should choose to follow....

My AXELOS, the new content subscription service from AXELOS, includes access to digital badges for ITIL ® , PRINCE2 ® and MSP ® certifications plus CPD in each area of knowledge. But why is investing in digital badges an important part of demonstrating your credibili...

We are going through a light-speed technology revolution: from IT modernization to digital transformations, the internet of things (IoT) , cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), not to mention “quantum computing”. My advice? Hold on tight, continue to learn and g...

My first three days in a new job with a training company just before the Millennium comprised the I TIL ® Foundation course. Those three days changed my career. After the course I realized ITIL was what I’d been seeking during my 15 years working in IT. The course made s...

One of the major challenges for IT is that it still operates in a silo . An organization might understand its strategy, but the IT goals are often not aligned with the strategy; equally, there may not be a holistic view across the business and IT. This needs a mindset s...

People and organizations seek out the reassurance in structured recommendations from sources like ITIL ® . These sources essentially articulate in a cogent and accessible way the learning from others who have been in the same place before them, facing the same challenges...

Why, in project management, are small projects treated as the “poor relation”? Many Project Managers aspire to manage large projects and programmes – large, transformation activities with high visibility, significant resources and a lot of kudos! As such, an aspirational Pr...

How can you use ITIL ® to address real business problems and add value while bringing along people who might be resistant to change? Progressing iteratively means that changes (in effect, smaller changes) are easier for people to stomach and you’ll get a better level o...

Project management and transformation practitioners Stephen Dowling and Stephen Callaghan have been sharing their 'Adapt or Die!' ideas with organizational change practitioners in Australia. AXELOS caught up with them to find out what this means for projects and project man...

Why do you want or need a project and programme management (PPM) qualification? Ultimately the reason should be to achieve successful management of projects, programmes and portfolios. However, people often get pushed into getting a qualification for the wrong reasons. If t...

What is the difference between leadership, management, and governance? Peter Drucker said that “leadership does the right thing while management does things right”. But why is it important to distinguish between them? Issues arise when people confuse the roles, and while...

There is an important question for project and programme professionals in 2018: now that you’ve passed your test, how are you learning to drive? By this I mean that, presently, colleagues who have passed their best practice foundation and practitioner examinations are not ...

In the first post in this series, Service Monitoring as a Strategic Opportunity , one of the topics that we discussed was the need for a "Service Monitoring Service " that would act as the monitoring platform for all of the various application and service teams within the s...

ITIL is being challenged by ‘shiny new’ philosophies, methodologies and frameworks that have recently laid claim to the work practices of service management professionals. But how valid and viable are these new approaches and how do they relate to the ITIL ® framework ...

LocWorld is a localization conference that I’d wanted to attend for several years. Localization, for those of you who might not have come across the term, is the process of amending a product so it works in a local context. Traditionally, this was primarily about translatio...

We have often discussed how technology and new frameworks have changed our service management practices and how we need to adopt and adapt them. Still as we know there is another key pillar: People. People are often the last step in any improvement plan. Trainings are the f...

Over the last year and a bit, our team has been lucky to have had the opportunity to meet with and speak to the wonderful ITSM community worldwide to understand how ITIL is being used to deliver value with IT Service Management (ITSM). A lot of this is captured in the AXELOS ...

In ITSM you need the skills to influence people beyond having a process and that’s all about relationships, interaction and successful communication. Human-to-human interaction seems an obvious concept? But how well do people in IT/ITSM perform in this respect? Over the ...

Earlier in the series, we discussed the importance of enabling features in our Service Monitoring Service that make the application teams want to use the service rather than building their own “page myself” scripts.There are many features that we may add, but there are thre...

Many organizations either don’t understand or avoid organizational change management (OCM), choosing rather to focus on the technical elements of change. Of course, this ignores that the human factor could be integral to failure of a change programme. Today’s self-service t...

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...

What you should do to improve project success and achieve value has been high on the agenda this year. Equally, the increased uncertainty in the economy has raised awareness of the need for increased professionalism in project and programme management (PPM) . In short, we’v...

What does a good PMO (project/programme management office) look like? The standard response is often to describe a best practice model and list some core services, but I want to challenge this perspective. In my view, it doesn’t really matter what activities your PMO provid...

As an organization are you interested in attracting top talent? In growing your business? Providing your employees, the tools they need to be successful? If you are than you need to create a learning-centred work culture. Our re cent ITSM and PPM benchmarking surveys sho...

Stakeholders can make or break projects or programmes . If they feel overlooked, not listened to or ignored, then your project will be in trouble – no matter how well you deliver in terms of budget, time and quality. Just giving them what they want is not usually a viable ...

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...

Project management learning is influenced increasingly by the importance of engagement . Tenets of engagement such as trust, relationships, communication and collaboration are all part of the behavioural and contextual competencies emerging in project management. Vodafone...

In early December 2016, Kaimar Karu and I found ourselves in Portland, Oregon running a workshop with Jon Terry, Shane Carlson, and Kevin Behr. Over dinner one night, we started talking about Enterprise Service Management (ESM). Differences in opinion started to surface, and ...

Background Hopefully you will all have seen the research that AXELOS recently published around the perception of ITIL in the current market. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, you can download it from the box to the right of this page. The research has been well rec...

AXELOS Community hosted Whaling Week, a look into the results of a successful Whaling attack in your organization. We now present four of the best replies from throughout the week. We appreciate all the responses we received throughout Whaling Week, we had a great time readi...

Professionalism - for the true professional - is not a “flash in the pan” but a long-term commitment. But a commitment to what , exactly? It’s about dedicating yourself to developing the skills, competencies, behaviours and attitudes that move you beyond completing a c...

How can change management – across portfolios, programmes and projects – really be embedded in organizations? There is – today – a major shift in how organizations view the proposals they receive for achieving effective change. Now, they are turning their attention more to...

What have all the successful teams throughout history had in common? The England Football Team 1966, Apollo 11 astronauts or Sir Edmund Hillary’s Mount Everest expedition team were all made up of individuals with different skills and experiences working towards a common goa...

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...

Project manager, Ana Bertacchini, examines the importance of emotional intelligence for project managers and how best practice methods such as PRINCE2 ® can help. Emotional intelligence is about managing and understanding emotions – both your own and others’. Unlike t...

Before any discussion about ITIL's "adopt and adapt" approach, it's important that we dispel some ITIL myths. The principal myths state that ITIL is: Useful for large organizations only Bureaucratic Time consuming Non-Agile Prescriptive. Traditionally, ITIL's commun...

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...

If you think of process improvement in IT Service Management (ITSM) as having a clear linear structure, you’re probably thinking about it the wrong way. With process improvement, you’re never really done. Typically, process improvement activity happens reactively rather tha...

Reality TV show Shark Tank panellist and entrepreneur Kevin O'Leary always asks: “How do I make money” when presented with any product. The value to him is simple – getting the biggest return on investment with the least amount of risk. Focusing on value is extremely i...

Programme managers juggle a wide range of challenges and many will get a buzz from bringing order to chaos and under-performance. All will want to avoid the pitfalls of change. Here are five change mistakes that a good programme manager will avoid in situations the really e...

ITIL ® has always been dynamic. It has evolved over time to reflect changes to the way organizations work, different service management concepts and priorities and our understanding of the different capabilities required to deliver value. Now it’s time to update ITIL ...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme , experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your skills and kno...

Business service management (BSM) is about bringing value to a business through matching overall business objectives with IT. Arguably, the concept has been with us for some time; but like the latest version of ITIL ® addresses the issue of business and services, it ha...

“Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They'd rather show the highlight of what they've become" – Angela Duckworth author of 'Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success'. In my career, I have been very blessed with opportunities, life less...

Why is it important to plan a project and why are project plans not taken seriously enough? Planning is an integral part of our everyday lives and is perceived as a natural process, such as deciding what to do at the weekend. So why do some people still see it as a tick box...

Projects and project management are about delivering change that your organization values. Doing that needs task orientation: you focus on what needs to be done, by when and to what quality – the founding pillars of project management . That same task orientation can le...

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...

Would you lie on your CV to secure your dream job? Well, you might not. But before you dismiss the idea that this practice goes on, the latest facts tell a different story about job applicants and, even more alarmingly, about employers: Data gathered by the UK’s Office f...

A career in project management is more popular than ever before, but what does it take to get your foot in the door?  Lindsay Scott, director at Arras People, provides some direction. There has been a dramatic shift in the way people enter project management over the ...

Selling the enterprise-wide benefits of ITIL and Programme and Project Management (PPM) to businesses and other complex organizations should be the daily bread for anyone making a living in global best practice training. Selling the enterprise-wide benefits of ITIL and Progr...

How to develop and grow control processes that work for your teams How do teams deliver better quality software or an IT solution at a pace that matches the needs of a business? This question is especially pertinent in the context of the solution development lifecycle an...

Why is IT and - consequently ITSM - under pressures that can pull it in two different directions? Leading research company, Gartner, calls it "bimodal IT" and depicts it as “rocks in a river”: solid IT operational excellence standing against the fast-moving flow of digital. ...

IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioners often forget that service management was not something they invented but rather a concept taken and adapted to create their own view of the world. They borrowed the principles of good customer service used by businesses, put “IT” in...

Every service management implementation is a cultural transformation. And culture change is an even bigger issue for senior management than it is for IT and ITSM, as they need to recognize that for such a transformation to be successful, they need to lead and be role mode...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme, experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your skills and knowled...

Being able to break through jargon is vital for effective communication, particularly when dealing with people who have little or no technical background. This is particularly true in change management where a breakdown in communication can potentially lead to failure in any ...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit , Simone presented a session on Creative Solutions and Energetic Contributions . Watch the video below and read her new blog post which also discusses the importance of collaboration and stakeholder management and how ITIL P...

In IT and ITSM, we’re living in the age of change – and that change is accelerating. If the birth of the internet was the start of this new age, we’ve now entered the next evolutionary stage: that includes a combination of cloud computing, mobility, big data analytics, ro...

The ITIL ® Practitioner guiding principles are not independent of each other. You don’t start with focus on value then, once you’ve finished that, start thinking about a different principle. All nine guiding principles work together to help ensure you do the right things...

There are a lot of misconceptions around ITIL as a tool within IT Service Management (ITSM). Some people believe that if they implement a ‘tool’ or an aspect of the guidance, they’re implementing the whole thing. Others think that if they implement a tool it will fix every...

Getting your awareness training right is essential for cyber resilience Cyber-related fraud is at its highest level since 2008 according to the latest research – a stark fact that makes information security awareness learning for employees more vital than ever. The recen...

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...

Project managers don’t do enough to advance their careers, even in the current climate where change is constant. And in a year when almost a third of PPM practitioners predict * no increase in their salaries, improving job and earnings prospects needs to be high on the lis...

I n a recent webinar hosted by New Horizons, AXELOS’ ITSM Product Ambassador, Akshay Anand, shared his thoughts about one buzzword of the moment, digital transformation: What is digital transformation , how are companies going about accomplishing it and what does th...

I’m a big believer that projects are a product of the people who are involved in them. Of course, an agile framework and clearly defined measures of control are essential but, based on my experience, people have to enjoy what they’re doing and want to work together to ac...

Organizations today are struggling to stay responsive and effective in the face of constant change. Most are struggling just to catch up with, let alone get in front of, the accelerating turbulence that seems to infect every industry being impacted by ‘macro disruption’: A te...

IT Infrastructure management and support domain are experiencing a new makeover when it comes to tools, technologies, and methods that are being introduced on top of the service layer. Support and service are an integral part of every business. Every organization is an IT org...

The Project Sponsor is accountable for the project; or, put another way, the Project Sponsor is the “owner” of the project and the business case that supports it. A sponsor needs to be actively involved and committed to the project in order for it to be successful and shoul...

The transition from project to programme management means being able to adapt and to draw upon a set of different skills as programme management is more than just being able to manage multiple projects. Where a Project Manager can deliver against a set of pre-defined goals a...

Managing projects and programmes differs based on the objectives each tends to have. Where project management focuses on one specific element to address a particular business process, programme management not only has a greater monetary value but also a wider range of people...

Abid Ismail was named the new CEO of AXELOS in December 2015, having been Chief Financial Officer since the company was formed in 2013. In a series of blog posts by Abid that will focus on the different stages of learning, development of knowledge and learning validati...

It is very easy to look at best practice and/or a number of existing Project Management Offices (PMOs) in your industry sector and decide on what functions and services are ‘best’ for your organization. However, a best practice PMO has a problem-focused purpose, with its fun...

According to the recent AXELOS PPM Benchmark study , nearly half of project managers who rarely or never conduct project reviews have experienced project failure in the past 12 months – this compares to only 34% of those who review either always or most of the time. Thes...

Hi everyone, thanks for listening to the second audio discussion we recorded at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016 in San Francisco. Listen to the interview One of the topics that repeatedly popped up at the conference – whether it was within presentations, during inform...

What does the future hold for IT service management (ITSM) and project management professionals? Since we launched AXELOS Membership it’s something that we’ve been wanting to explore, especially from a skills perspective, which is why we embarked on this project. The r...

ITIL Practitioner is best practice guidance I use both in implementation as a consultant and in training people working in IT service management. Before the arrival of ITIL ® Practitioner there was, in my opinion, a large gap between ITIL Foundation and ITIL Expert ....

In today’s world of digital transformation and disruption, organizations are in a constant state of change. Those that respond well will flourish, but building this capability effectively requires much more than a generic understanding. Tech giants Google, Apple and Micro...

When project management relationships break down, most of the time the underlying reason lies in misaligned organizational strategic priorities, which result in misaligned project objectives. This prevents the delivery of value to the organization, stakeholders and ultimately...

In this two-part blog series, ITSM and organizational change expert, Karen Ferris explains the importance of organizational change management and reviews the knowledge and tools available in ITIL Practitioner to support change professionals with OCM. Organizational cha...

In the second of a two-part blog series, ITSM and organizational change expert, Karen Ferris continues her exploration of organizational change management  (OCM) by looking at managing and reinforcing change. She also considers the knowledge and tools available in ITIL ® ...

In the international bestseller The 7 habits of highly effective people (Free Press, 1988), Steven R. Covey describes an approach to being effective in attaining goals by aligning oneself to what he calls the ‘true north’ principles of a character ethic that are universal...

Project managers - by their very nature - generally don't start a new project without an underlying belief that their project will be a success. However, what should sit alongside this optimism at the outset of a project is an equal dose of realism and a willingness to ask c...

Organizations are not generally well-prepared for IT service transition. Either they outsource it because they’re not good at it, or they muddle through it. Recently, I’ve witnessed some transitions which have inspired me to revisit this topic. Typically, service transi...

When planning your ITSM career goals and trying to decide how to achieve them, one of the most important things a practitioner can do is an assessment of where you are now and how you got there. Looking at the pathway you took to your current position – including your expe...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme, experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your skills and knowle...

A best practice qualification might be treated like a shiny, new toy. However, it will lose its sparkle unless there’s more to it than just gaining the certificate. Not that it’s wrong to want qualifications: for example, your employer might have a set methodology that mean...

Many people associate ITIL’s core books with managing incidents and problems. This focus on break/fix scenarios is probably historical, but the misconception is still very much alive. Having been an ITIL trainer for more than 15 years and practising even longer, the o...

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...

Part of the new My AXELOS subscription service for best practice professionals is a focus on “community”. The AXELOS online community is a place where you can learn and interact with other people involved in IT service management, project management and cyber resilience. ...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme , experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your skills and kno...

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...

In IT service management (ITSM) education is critical: it helps organizations get a shared understanding of terms and concepts and a proven body of knowledge such as ITIL ® . The IT industry is rife with buzzwords carrying varied interpretations, so education helps ...

What does migrating IT services to the cloud mean for ITIL ® ? I’ve heard various comments along the lines of “it’s no longer our infrastructure , it’s the responsibility of the cloud provider so why are we bothering with ITIL?” I find this really surprising as cloud integ...

The traits of the perfect project manager (PM) from my experience should include the following. The list is not exhaustive so I welcome any additions or challenges to those listed below. As a project manager you need to have the goal of striving for perfection. This will kee...

Though a performance analytics and testing company, SOASTA use ITIL ® best practice to consider key processes for any application lifecycles and have applied them to their development methodology. In this blog, Dan discusses a little of what they have learned so far. ...

Recently, we investigated the misconceptions around ITIL in order to better understand and address the common challenges when adopting ITIL. We asked our community members to share their stories. To our delight, our members did not stop at listing the challenges, but f...

With the launch of AXELOS’ Professional Development Programme , we have updated one of our previous blogs on our Career Paths tool, which we designed to help you identify the professional skills needed to progress in some of the main job areas in today’s marketplace. You ...

Project teams are increasingly becoming virtual in one form or another. This can include working across different geographies, time zones, firm-wide boundaries and with third parties. Projects can cover a number of different countries with virtual teams and as Project Manag...

I started life in IT as a technical support assistant about eight years ago and I have worked in a number of different organizations. In that time, I’ve often been the only woman in the IT department. There are few IT women in Kenya due to a mix of cultural and practical rea...

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...

The "S" factor - sponsors and stakeholders - are critical to the success of any project or programme. And ensuring these vital people are actively supporting you and your team depends on how successful you are at "managing upwards". People tend to "buy into" programmes as t...

Gregor McPherson, who has worked with AXELOS and contributed to our new Professional Development Programme, is a consultant specialist in business solution design and architecture. He draws on 15 years of insight from senior roles in a wide a range of industries and discipli...

Oh, it’s THAT time again! Perhaps the contract you’ve been working on is coming to an end or you’ve been stuck in a role for a few years now and it's definitely time to move on. But who would have thought that just ‘updating your CV’ could be so arduous? “Did I really fi...