Friday March 10, 2006
PRINCE2: Organized project management methodology
Last week, I attended a week's course to get certified for PRINCE2 Foundation level and Practitioner level.
PRINCE stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments and is a standard project management methodology adopted by many companies in Europe and Asia and is gradually catching up in the US. It is the UK Government's standard for project management and is in fact part of the Office of Government Commerce(OGC).
The course helped me get a very organized but non-bureaucratic and flexible approach to project management. The methodology espouses management by exception and covers organization, management, and control of projects. Important aspects cover emphasis on the business case for justifying projects, planning, risk & issue management, and quality assurance. The methodology uses a process based approach allowing for projects to go through a step by step process (but not necessarily linear) from start to finish showing how to rather than dealing with mere concepts.
I now look forward to opportunities to apply what I learned, here at Sun and contribute to our continuous improvement.
Posted at 08:48AM Mar 10, 2006 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in General | Comments[5]
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This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on March 10, 2006 at 08:51 AM PST #
Posted by Shreedhar on March 10, 2006 at 09:02 AM PST #
My key take aways:
1. P2 can be used in conjunction with other project mgt metholodologies (Six Sigma, for example)
2. You don't/shouldn't implement every single P2 sub-process unless you really need it. Granted, this is just good common sense, but I've joined many projects where process was in place just because w/ little or no value.
3. The P2 manual is more of a text book as opposed to something one would read cover to cover. :-)
When I took the practitioner exam, it was physically grueling because it was a 3-4 hour WRITTEN exam consisting of 3 essay questions. Is this still the case? I blogged about my P2 at Sun experiences a while ago here.
Posted by skrocki on March 10, 2006 at 12:45 PM PST #
Yes, the exam is still 3 hour essay type with 3 questions with possible subquestions. One has to wait about 8 weeks for getting the results though.
Posted by Shreedhar on March 10, 2006 at 01:39 PM PST #
Posted by Ramesh Pachamuthu on March 16, 2006 at 08:26 AM PST #