Prince 2 training Practitioner level

[higham5]

Bit of advice from the collective please. My daughter is a scientist working in the Bio Science field , over the last two years she has moved away from pure research and it now managing the scale up of products from lab/ pre production to production.

This involves multi stakeholders and managing projects. From my quality background I have suggested Prince 2 although I know very little about it! Happily she has taken my advice and wants to start informal discussions ahead of her annual review and CPD discussions.

My background is Lean Sigma and a quick review of providers indicates a blend of tutor led / or E programmes. However they are all coy on prices and its difficult to assess who are the blue riband providers and who just has a nice website.

Could anyone who has more knowledge than me please chip in, all suggestions gratefully received, since as a” dad” Im supposed to have all of this knowledge to hand.

Thanks in advance

Steve

[joe narvey]

Prince2 was great for government with the inbuilt checkpoints, but Agile seems to dominate in a lot of sectors now. I suggested to my daughter ( healthcare) that she looks as a hybrid Program for MSP/Prince/Agile.

I wouldn’t discount Agile, but hope the discipline of lab work required Prince2.

[vortgern]

Providers:
Did my PRINCE2 with Quanta in Worcester a few years ago and they were excellent. Colleagues did it through QA and they seemed good too.

PRINCE2:
Does your daughter’s employer use PRINCE2?
A working knowledge of a few methodologies might be more beneficial?

[PhilipK]

I did my PRINCE2 with Balance Global. They were very good, but totally focussed on passing the exam (which you may regard as a good or a bad thing...)

However, my experience with a number of large organisations (I was not a "Project Manager" although I was effectively managing some very large projects) is that nobody sticks to PRINCE2 (or Agile, or any of the other methodologies) but instead tend to use it as a basic framework, with lots of workarounds and local variances. Where it was useful to me was in understanding the language/jargon that our Project and Programme Managers were using.

At the end of the day, a good PM is one who gets the jobs done to time and budget, not somebody who has followed every step of the path, held every meeting and completed every document that some PRINCE2 practitioners seem to think are required.

[TaketheCannoli]

Spot-on

....nobody sticks to PRINCE2 (or Agile, or any of the other methodologies) but instead tend to use it as a basic framework, with lots of workarounds and local variances. Where it was useful to me was in understanding the language/jargon that our Project and Programme Managers were using.

At the end of the day, a good PM is one who gets the jobs done to time and budget, not somebody who has followed every step of the path, held every meeting and completed every document that some PRINCE2 practitioners seem to think are required.

[TaketheCannoli]

PRINCE II was great for waterfall projects and creating project discipline however I'm finding Agile is now more common-place. So I guess it depends what methodology her company wants to use.

[r1ch]

I did my Practitioner through "The Knowledge Academy". They run courses around the country at various adhoc venues for F2F tutor led sessions. I'd been running projects for a number for years and did the week long, "cram and exam" - with self study beforehand. Worked OK. From memory I think it ws about £600, although that could be complete tosh! - If you have a squint on their website I think they're reasonably upfront about the costs involved. In terms of Agile vs Prince, it does really depend on the nature of the project(s). It's currently fashionable to attempt to use Agile for most things although it is more ideally suited to Software development. Infrastructure led proejcts are much better managed via a PRINCE-esque methodology in my experience, (although there will be many opinions on that last point I'm sure!). Best of luck to her!

[guinea]

I did my foundation and practitioner many moons ago. It's OK, but almost never used (in IT at least) these days. There is Prince 2 Agile, but I don't know anyone who's done it.

The course is worth doing even though it's unlikely anyone will run a Prince2 project in real life. The vocabulary and building blocks are valuable whether you are working waterfall or agile. Just because agile doesn't have many of the same structures explicitly identified doesn't mean they aren't important concepts to understand.

It's similar to ITIL in IT. Understanding the vocabulary and concepts of the traditional world helps massively when building out DevOps/agile teams at scale.

[higham5]

Wow , thanks for this insights folks . I will pass on all the comments to her.

Again many thanks

Steve.

[EmilA]

Another vote for Agile over Prince2. I've found Prince2 as an object to get your CV into places. I am a certified Prince2 Practitioner and also have DevOps Agile certification which I found more beneficial to my day to day work (IT Service Management)