Reading time: 14 minutes

I’ve been delivering projects and programmes for over 20 years. During that time, I’ve interviewed countless numbers of people for project management positions. Despite the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed who professed to have Prince2 qualifications, I’ve never met anyone who could tell me what the ethos of Prince2 is (and if you think its ‘Project in Controlled Environments’ you don’t know the answer either!).

In this article I’m going to explain why project management certifications can be a waste of time and money, and what you can do about it, whether you’re looking to get certified or whether you run a project management function. And I might even explain to you what the ethos of Prince2 is.

Before I go any further, I should declare that I do have project management certifications. These include CompTIA: IT Project+ (that takes me back a long way!), Prince2 Practitioner, and Agile PM Practitioner.

So what about you? Are you certified? Did you take a Foundation exam and end your certification path there, or did you go on to become a certified Practitioner?

If you stopped at Foundation level, I guarantee that you know very little, if anything, about that specific methodology.

I once had a member of my team who boasted to me that he didn’t have the time to study for his Prince2 foundation exam, yet crammed the night before, and then passed the following day. He saw this as a great achievement. It took my asking him questions about the methodology for him to realise that he’d learnt very little, and simply tested his short-term memory.

Why get certified in project management methodologies?

When considering certification, people typically fall into one of 3 camps:

* They want to learn a better way to deliver projects

* They get certified to increase their value, either to gain a pay rise, stay competitive with colleagues, or seek new employment

* Their organisation is tied to a specific methodology, and it is mandatory that they are trained in it

Most project management certifications have multiple levels, such as Foundation and Practitioner. And they typically lead on to further study and certification paths, such as Managing Successful Programmes (MSP).

Why certification can be a problem

I’ve seen organisations of all types attempt to implement a project management methodology only to fail. I’ve also seen many people achieve certification, only to become disillusioned some time after, and to eventually ignore much of what they’ve learnt. Here’s why I think this happens:

* You get certified, but you’re not in a role that currently requires the skills: This is a frequent and easy mistake to make. With the best intentions you head off to get certified. If you’re lucky, the investment is made by your employer, or you may be choosing to invest your own money. Training in something that you then don’t use results in the knowledge being mostly lost over time. You need to be in an environment where you can immediately put your training to use. (If you are investing your own money recognise that it typically costs more as an individual, as companies can take advantage of bulk purchase discounts. It always pays to shop around, but also research the training organisation to make sure you will receive quality training. Make sure that the fees include exam fees too, and ideally look for an organisation that guarantees a pass, which means they will pay for multiple exam attempts).

* Your organisation doesn’t have many, or even any, other people currently certified: It’s very difficult to apply project management methodologies in isolation. Training a single person and then expecting them to introduce the methodology into your organisation is a fast route to failure. You need a small team trained in a methodology in order to have critical mass.

Reading time: 4 minutes

I recently presented at a Microsoft conference on the topic of developing your IT Strategy. This is a challenge that many IT Leaders face, yet there is surprisingly little guidance available.

To aid you we will shortly be releasing our IT Strategy Toolkit which provides the methodology that we created and follow ourselves, along with various tools, templates, and guidance. We’ve also included notes from the field that detail our own experience and the things to watch out for.

Whilst I was presenting at the Microsoft/Lawnet seminar I put forward 3 Big Ideas to improve your IT Strategy. These are:

* Remove Innovation Spend from the IT Budget

* Immerse IT in the Business

* Engage the IT Team with the firm’s clients

Let’s take a look at each in turn to explore where they can have a major impact on the value of your IT Strategy.

1. Remove Innovation Spend from the IT Budget

In most organisations the IT budget covers both on-going ‘keep the lights on’ costs, and innovation spend. The industry average is an 80/20 split between keeping the lights on and innovation. On the web you’ll find guidance and wisdom which suggest that you work hard to get this ratio closer to 50/50, which is about the maximum that you could ever achieve. However I believe this is the wrong approach.

Whilst the IT team will always be innovating internally within IT, looking for tools and approaches to improve the world of IT and the business, these are typically business-wide improvements. Or they are improvements focused on IT operational processes only, with little tangible impact upon the business. The real innovation value will come from the business, working in partnership with IT. The business case to make change should reside with the business, and therefore the budget for any IT costs as part of that innovation should also come from the business.

Innovation spend may result in on-going IT maintenance costs which will need to be added to the IT budget for future years. But in the first instance it is a business project and a business cost. This will ensure the business takes responsibility for IT spend. To determine an innovation budget, it can either be set at a central level to be called upon by the different business units, or each business unit may be apportioned its own innovation budget.

When the innovation budget sits within IT there is a risk that some projects may not to be done due to lack of budget, and others that perhaps should be skipped, are being done so funds can be used up to avoid reducing future budget. Also, if the IT budget is being maintained at the same level, or even reducing, this could have a negative impact on business innovation.

This alternative approach would leave IT to focus on driving down the cost (as a percentage of revenue) of keeping the lights on, whilst not compromising on business innovation.

2. Immerse IT in the Business

We recently conducted a survey on IT Strategy Maturity. What’s really revealing in the survey results is that the IT leadership team rarely engages with people within the business units to seek their input to the IT Strategy. Business unit leaders were the second highest people consulted, but the actual team members doing the work were only consulted by 11% of organisations. I think this results in a lot of missed innovation opportunity.

PWC recently recognised this opportunity. They launched an app that allows employees to suggest innovative ideas that could help the firm’s clients. They have received ideas that have benefited both clients and internally too, reporting direct savings in the 100’s of thousands of dollars.

Reading time: 6 minutes

Cloud technologies have been around for some years now. We all use them, whether we realise it or not. LinkedIn is a cloud based application, as too are most other social media apps. Skype is a cloud app. And Microsoft Office365 is a cloud-based offering of the Microsoft Office suite.

But what does it mean when something is in the cloud? And what can we get from the cloud?

Understanding how technologies work together

To understand the cloud we must first understand how different technologies work together to provide the applications that we use. At Camford Management Consultants we use what we call the Layered Framework, as shown below. The framework represents the stack of technologies in a logical order.

At the top level of the technology stack are the business activities. Whilst not a technology, the business activities are the only reason why you have the technologies in the underlying layers.

The second layer is the Applications layer.

We all use applications in both our personal and professional lives. And we all use cloud-based apps on our mobile phones. The most obvious example is email. But there’s tons of different applications for every conceivable purpose. For example, you might be a runner and use Runkeeper to track your running, or you might be on a diet and be calorie tracking in MyFitnessPal. Perhaps you’re checking your lottery results in the Lotto app, or keeping up with the news on the BBC News app.

Whilst we can all waste a lot of time on non-business applications, the applications that we use in business only exist to make our work activities easier and/or less risky. They provide efficiency through fast access to data and from process automation.

It’s not just your phone that you’re accessing cloud apps on

This is where the third layer of the technology stack comes in. This is what we term End-User Technologies. In IT speak you are the end-user. The person that uses an application or technology. The end-user technologies are those devices that are ‘owned’ by the user. They may ultimately belong to the organisation you work for, but for the most part they are assigned to a single individual.

This ownership is not a hard and fast rule. For example, in a call centre the computers (‘desktops’ in IT speak) might be used by multiple people working on different shifts. End user technologies are, however, those devices that are not kept in the controlled environment of a data centre or computer room. They include: smart phones, tablets, Phablets (large screen smartphones that fill the gap between a tablet and a traditional smart phone), laptops, and desktops.

The vast majority of the applications we use access and store data centrally. This requires both centralised storage and applications to run on servers. Servers are essentially the big brothers of desktops. They have far greater power and serve multiple users at once. They make up the fourth layer of the framework.

Finally there is the networks that connect the servers and storage to the end-user technologies so that the applications can all communicate. Given the performance required, the business criticality and the security requirements, the servers, storage and core networks are housed in the data centre (I won’t go into the difference between a data centre and computer room – we’ll save that for another day!).

So where does the cloud fit in?

Well, that all depends. The cloud is a bit of a catch all term for a suite of technology and service offerings. These offerings are often known by another term which is XaaS. The X refers to a number of possibilities (described below), and the ‘aaS’ refers to as-a-service. Using the layered framework we can see the various XaaS, or as-a-service offerings, which include:

* SaaS – Software as a Service

* DaaS – Desktop as a Service