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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...

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 ...

If you’ve recently completed your ITIL Foundation certification, first of all, congratulations! Anytime you achieve something it’s important to take a moment to reflect on your accomplishment. You’re now part of an elite group of ITIL certification holders so welcome to the...

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...

The value of programme and project assurance can be described as the process of checking that a programme or project makes the right commitments to the business and then delivers on those commitments. Assurance provides an  independent, confidential, objective view  of progra...

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...

As usual, reading an article by Paul Wilkinson , is always a refreshing experience with food for thought. That wasn’t any different when I started reading his AXELOS blog on " the evolution in ITSM part 1 ". However, when reading the following paragraph, I experienced a ‘fu...

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AXELOS has updated the PRINCE2 project management guidance & launched new Foundation & Practitioner exams. They form the PRINCE2 2017 update: find out more.

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...

Personal information is an asset that can create more value for customers, hence people want to share their data with organizations. However, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) says we have to manage their data properly. From 25 May 2018, this applies insi...

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...

When embarking on any project, the hardest part is knowing where to begin. But as the Guiding Principles of ITIL Practitioner recommend, my view is that you should start where you are. I recently put these principles into practice when completing a strategic review of our I...

How does an organization instil the required discipline to align portfolios and hold itself to account? Step 1: Business forecast New market opportunities drive strategic change . This means the first step should be to look at what kind of an organization you need to b...

Digital disruption is transforming the way industries operate. But for a successful legacy business with an established infrastructure and corresponding capabilities, introducing change can be a challenge. You begin with the end in mind – and that’s the vision. By that, I d...

What makes some change initiatives bloom while others wither and die? A 2013 study of pilot programmes by the National Academy of Sciences found that few effective pilot programmes remain effective at larger scales. The reasons may lie in both our natural resistance to new...

Release, Control and Validation (RCV) is a module within the Intermediate level of the ITIL certification scheme. Find out more about this module.

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...

Hitesh Patel demystifies the role and qualities of the Service Delivery Manager and where ITIL® Practitioner’s best practice guidance can support their work: Service Delivery Manager (SDM) is a role many people struggle with within IT Service Management (ITSM) and, for...

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...

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...

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. ...

In today’s world of technology, businesses need to understand customers and their role in delivering service and value to them. Tech start-ups get this, with delivery teams focused on giving customers what they need and faster than ever before. But how well are organizations...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Michael presented a session on Small scale ITSM implementation and ITIL Practitioner . Watch the video and read his new blog post also discussing this topic. How do you apply a large, comprehensive framework like ITIL ®...

No matter how sophisticated an organization’s technical controls, there is always a risk of attack. In this day and age, with the great speed at which technology is advancing, the constant evolution of threats makes it impossible for any business to be 100% protected; what th...

The use of managed service providers is relatively common across all sorts of organizations. Unfortunately, what’s also common is ineffective relationships and ways of working between businesses and their provider. Most organizations work with a managed service provider 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...

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...

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...

How can communication within IT service management (ITSM) – and ultimately with the business it supports – be improved? The silos that can develop among different parts of organizations need something that bridges the gap between the professionals that create and build t...

“ Elas Projetam ” literally translates as “they (women) make projects” and perfectly encapsulates the focus of this recently-formed, voluntary organization in Brazil. Here, Vanessa Guimarães explains how the initiative aims to connect women working in project management and...

What are the factors that make a strategic programme work? a question that might have helped the set rebuild project of the BBC’s flagship soap opera in the UK, “EastEnders”. The UK Government’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) recently published a report into the transform...

ITIL Intermediate’s Service Design (SD) module provides one of the most important approaches to deliver a service that works and enables value creation. Without employing SD and, for example, moving to transition without much design and attention to processes there is a ...

We have recently published the third instalment of our Global PPM Benchmarking series and it makes for compelling reading. The report has been designed to offer market insight into the status of project and programme management highlighting the growing trends and key issues...

Details of the PRINCE2 Agile Certification Scheme and associated Foundation and Practitioner examinations.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

According to the 2017 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. These ...