I recently took the 5 day Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) course with Maven Training.  I’ve done courses with Maven in the past, and I’ve also met many of their team and their CEO Melanie Franklin.  But the reason I choose them this time was because of their innovative approach to delivering training in a way that makes it fit around the day job.  In my case, I signed up for the weekend version of MSP.  That’s just one day out of the office on a Friday, followed by Saturday and Sunday training, plus the following weekend too.  What a great idea, I thought.  Five days of learning for only one day out of the office!  A perfect way to manage my development and the commitments to my projects.  It wasn’t for me, though.

There’s no downtime

Each weekend day I was up early to make it to the venue on time.  Even though I was in jeans and a T-shirt (this one, on the Foundation exam day), I was still doing work-related things and talking about work.  The other delegates weren’t my usual team, but we still mainly talked about our programmes.  The weekend felt like work days.  So I was reading and responding to work emails during the breaks.  And thinking about work and taking notes of things I needed to do back in the office.

We worked the hours of a normal weekday, and then had homework to do in the evenings. Homework, on top of normal weekend activities, like making sure all my washing was done, spending time with family, going food shopping.  This was OK(ish) during the first weekend but come the day of the Practitioner exam I had worked 13 days in a row and it wasn’t fun.

The City is closed at the weekend

Maven’s lovely offices are at Liverpool Street.  They feed you all day with fruit, crisps, tasty lunches that are different each day and a spread of afternoon tea.  But the City itself is pretty much closed.  I had bargained with myself that as a ‘reward’ for giving up my weekend I would get breakfast from Starbucks.  This was fine on Friday, but I hadn’t realised that with no commuters, there is no reason for any of the shops to open at the weekend.  Some of the shops inside Liverpool Street station even close on a Sunday.  No skinny latte and almond croissant for me.

The other implication for this is that the office buildings aren’t designed to be used during the weekends.  The air conditioning was switched off, the windows won’t open, and we had to rely on fans to keep the room cool.  The PRINCE2 weekend course delegates gave up one afternoon and just went home.  No doubt with homework.

Why you might consider it

While my experience of training over two weekends wasn’t great – although that is no reflection on the excellent trainer – weekend study might work for you.

Contractors taking PRINCE2 or MSP have to take 5 days out of work to do it the ‘normal’ way: that’s 5 days not earning and having to pay for the course – a double whammy.

If you have flexi-time options at work you could find that weekend courses mean you don’t have to take any time away from your day job.  If your manager is reluctant to let you out of the office for a complete week you could negotiate to take the time back in smaller chunks, like an afternoon off each week for the following month.

The main advantage for me was that I had a week between Foundation and Practitioner exams.  This meant more time to assimilate what I had learned, more time for practice papers and generally less of a rush to fit both the exams in.  And I passed them, so it must have worked!

Have you considered studying at the weekends?  What does you employer think about it?

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Are you seeing any of the problems faced by troubled programmes that I talked about last week?  If so, you need a recovery plan to get your programme back on track.

Here’s the 5 step ESI process for getting out of trouble.  The whole approach assumes you have been parachuted in to fix someone else’s flailing programme, which I suppose is what ESI do.  You can adapt the steps if you are trying to turn your own programme around, or make the steps smaller to turn around a project instead of a whole programme.

Assessment Phase

Step 1: Define Charter
Duration: 1-2 days

This formally sanctions the existence of an assessment and recovery effort.  It provides the assessment and recovery lead with the proper authority to complete the activities necessary to develop an assessment plan.
Define the charter with the sponsor and steering committee.  The charter should cover:

• Programme history and sensitivities (although I wouldn’t write all this down)
• Assessment approach: how many people are you going to interview, in individual meetings or in group sessions etc.
• An action plan with dates

Then get it all agreed – which is what the charter is for.  In this step you would also initiate contact with the programme and project teams.

Step 2: Develop assessment plan

In this step you aim to achieve the objectives of the charter.  This allows the assessment team to perform their assessment quickly, ensures accurate findings, and minimises distractions for the project team.  After all, you want to keep going with things that are progressing well.

• Establish a team
• Review and analyse the assessment model (how are we going to review documents, how are we going to move forward with analysis)
• Review critical documents
• Develop assessment plan

This is a formal step, so get the plan signed off.

Step 3: Conduct assessment plan
Duration: 2-5 days

In this step you determine the true current status of the programme and constituent projects.  You identify major threats, opportunities and problems.  You begin to consider the recovery as well as who would be on your recovery team.

• Establish a war room
• Assemble the team
• Implement the assessment plan (interviews and document review)
• Aggregate and rank-order the findings from the most problematic to least problematic
• Validate, update and finalise findings with programme team and sponsor

Recovery Phase

Step 4: Develop recovery plan

This step leads to a plan to get to a functioning programme.  You establish a road map and process to achieve the goals, and continue to build confidence and morale.

Prepare a plan that everyone sees as realistic and achievable: this helps build confidence.  There is no Plan B for this recovery plan: this is it!  The goal is to save the programme from loss and restore it to usefulness, preventing total failure along the way.

• Produce an achievable schedule
• Re-establish customer management confidence
• Negotiate a new baseline

Step 5: Conduct recovery plan

In this step you execute your recovery plan to return the programme to usefulness.  You validate estimating methods and their accuracy.  This allows you to produce an accurate forecast of programme completion.  Begin with the end in mind: a programme that is no longer in recovery.

You can watch the webinar yourself here (registration required).

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There’s only one thing worse than being told bad news, and that is being told about bad news late.  When a programme is failing, you should define the problem and potential solutions, and alert stakeholders at the first sign of trouble, according to LeRoy Ward, Executive VP at ESI.

I attended ‘Managing and Saving Programmes in a Changing World’, an audio/Webex conference with Ward recently.  Last week I wrote about the first half of the presentation, managing change programmes.  This is what Ward had to say about recovering troubled programmes.

Ward started off by explaining what a ‘troubled programme’ is.  There are several things that can go wrong in programme management:

• Business case deterioration:  the programme started off with a good business case but it no longer stacks up.
• Stakeholder evolution:  people change and new leaders at the top change the direction of the programme.
• Technical failure:  this creates a programme integration risk as what you are building might not sit in the organisation’s architecture any longer.
• Resource collapse:  either in the form of strikes or a key resource leaving.

So what can you do?

Don’t focus on the wrong issue.  The wrong issue is how you can catch up and finish on time. The right issue is how do you finish at all and gain something realistic benefit.

You need to regain control.  ‘Control’ is the scope, dates and roles on the programme which have been lost in through planning or execution in the first place.  The way out of this is to make big, targeted changes quickly.

This conflicts with the advice Scott Berkun gives in his book Making Things Happen.  He warns that if you make large changes you push the project off course and it can take a while before you see what you have done.  Then you over-correct by making another big change and you just weave from one crisis to another because you can’t keep your project on course.  So be careful about making big changes on a project that isn’t going that far wrong.

Ward identified several problems faced by failing programmes:

• Completing an accurate assessment of programme problems is difficult for the programme management team because they lack objectivity.  Using an outside assessment team creates objectivity.  Bring in technical specialists as required.
• There will be pressure from stakeholders to commit to a new schedule.  Measuring progress in small steps will help tremendously.
• It takes time to determine the work remaining.  Data about how far off the original estimates were is needed to make accurate forecasts.
• You need to sustain progress while planning recovery.  Additional temporary resources will be needed to do this.  The programme manager should direct the current workflow plus do all the work required to make progress with the recovery – no easy task!

Ward cautioned against declaring victory too soon.  Sustained control is necessary to prove that something has been turned around.  It takes teamwork to turn a programme around and then keep it on track.

Next week I’ll let you in on the 5 steps to recover a troubled programme.

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I joined in with Managing and Saving Programmes in a Changing World, an audio/Webex conference with LeRoy Ward, Executive VP at ESI, recently.

I couldn’t see who else was on the call (apart from the presenters) and I joined a bit late, so I felt sorry for them that they had started the presentation with no one listening to it.  At the end of the call there were several questions from other people so I gather that was just a participant privacy setting rather than a reflection on the fact that nobody wanted to learn about programme management.

It wasn’t radical – the ESI approach to managing programmes in a changing world is obviously to be great at the basics – but it was a good revision session and a reminder of the differences between projects and programmes.

The presentation was in two parts: managing programmes and the complexities of this, and saving a troubled programme.  This post looks at the first half of the presentation: managing programmes.

Sometimes managing with one sponsor is difficult enough.  However, multi-person sponsorship is more common than having a single sponsor in programme management, especially in large and complex programmes.  Ward highlighted some issues with programme sponsorship:

• The sponsor needs broader knowledge of the projects and business areas impacted by the programme.
• The programme requires more resources so the sponsor needs access to those resources in order to secure them for you.
• Multiple sponsorship means sponsors from different business areas and this can cause conflicts.

Ideally, a programme sponsor should be someone with a sound knowledge of business processes, able to effectively manage resources and help with securing and managing the financials.

In addition to a programme sponsor and a programme manager, the programme management team could include a change manager, a business analyst, a risk manager and a financial manager.

Part of effective programme management is effective change management.  Change management is all about conveying the need for change with a compelling vision of the ‘to be’ state.  Key to this is understanding the environment and culture so you can phrase the messages appropriately.

Ward suggested applying a regular ‘learning milestone’ by which I think he meant reviewing progress to date, making any tweaks and then shifting your approach to do things better.  And I would also add checking to see if the change you are making is sticking.

Ward also talked about choosing key programme team members wisely – just because someone thinks they understand change management doesn’t mean they do.  Apparently change management is a professional discipline in its own right.  I don’t dispute that, but I would love to be on a programme where I could employ a professional change manager plus all those other people to do risk, finances and analysis as full-time jobs.  In my experience it is much more likely for people to muck in and do what needs to be done to reach the end goal without having fancy job titles that delineate their roles from that of other people.

Ward said that to build the full commitment of the organisation to the change you need to acknowledge the impact of it on people.  He said that you need to give people empathy, not sympathy.  People want to be listened to more than they want to be talked at.  I have held ‘Town Hall’ style meetings before, specifically for groups of new recruits, but they are time consuming.  Still, all stakeholder management and project politics is time consuming, but it needs to be done to oil the wheels.

Next week I’ll fill you in on how a programme starts to fail and the main problems faced by teams trying to recover a failing programme.  After that you’ll get to read Ward’s 5 steps for recovering troubled programmes.

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1. Recovering troubled programmes (part 1) There’s only one thing worse than being told bad news, and that is being told about bad news late.  When a programme is failing, you...
2. Recovering troubled programmes (part 2) Are you seeing any of the problems faced by troubled programmes that I talked about last week?  If so, you need a recovery plan to...
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