The performance of successful projects now serves some 21 percent of the U.S. economy or a large 3.78 trillion dollars. That key finding comes from the well-known Report recently produced by PRINCE2, the world’s most-practiced method for project management.
With those projects varying from IT service management to logistics infrastructure, from procurement systems to major construction works, that is good news. But the report which corresponds with a significant update to PRINCE2 shows that both project managers and the decision makers around them can do remain more to assure project completion.
Life for project leaders can be tough.
Why Projects Fail?
Project leaders themselves, however, are also missing some significant tricks. The survey showed that only 20 percent of them attend regular end-of-project reviews. Even among that group, which attaches to good practice, project failure runs at 33 percent. Strikingly, the percentage increases to 53 percent between project leaders who take a more casual approach and never or infrequently send a review.
In other words, project failure could decline by more than a third if organizations learned from their experiences by strictly reviewing each project. In the situation of the $3.78 trillion project economy, good practice means big business.
PRINCE2 advocates powerful monitoring and assessment of projects, throughout and at the end of the project lifecycle — in fact, it consecrates a chapter of its guidance to “Ending Projects.” The study found that project leaders with a mature, skilled and well-integrated project management unit were double as likely to provide a successful project as new project management teams.
Technology advances to improve the world, but people are still people, and the core of successful project management continues the same: a clear picture of what you are trying to achieve; a compatible understanding of why it is worth making; precisely designated responsibilities and a sensitivity to the risks involved.
Improvements to PRINCE2
Over the years, the PRINCE2 method has been constantly updated in collaboration with project-management professionals from the widest possible extent of sectors and cultures.
Most importantly, the updated method is susceptible to advances in business practice that have taken place over the last decade or so.
In particular, this latest iteration of PRINCE2 highlights ways of tailoring PRINCE2 to the different requirements of organizations and project environments including those that favor an agile approach to project management.
Project leaders in every sector more found that they are expected to do more with tighter resources, balancing multiple projects and facing ever more challenging deadlines. Many of them find themselves under increasing force as they endeavour meet ever-changing briefs and continually-rising client expectations.
Meanwhile, about half of the respondents pointed out that profit margins have narrowed. Combining all these requirements are those developments in business practices and technology, which have driven up stakeholders’ expectations.
To rise to these demands, they need to adopt a flexible and scalable approach. The updated PRINCE2 is ideally configured to help them in tailoring their planning and gearing their actions to the specific requirements of the project in hand.
Making Projects Flexible
The update also fixes a particular focus on the theme of change, and in particular change control and configuration management. We all appreciate that a project can vary between its beginning and its end, but, to avoid arbitrary changes, you need to deal positively and accountable with any uncertainties that arise along the way. At each point, you need to go back to the business justification and the final to produce content for your organization.
Time and again we hear that the only steady in the current world is change and this is only too evident in the results of the Global Benchmark Report. Happily, the essential truths and practices of PRINCE2 are another constant: they remain as relevant as ever, and PRINCE2’s strength derives from decades of best practice in project management across diverse organizations and industries.
If PRINCE2 certification has long been a badge of honor for full-time project managers, it is now more popular for people from other specialist competences.
In another latest survey, 88 percent of PRINCE2 practitioners said that the qualification had assisted their career progression. Another instance of PRINCE2 ensuring project success!
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