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
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Spot-on
Originally Posted by PhilipK
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.
Wow , thanks for this insights folks . I will pass on all the comments to her.
Again many thanks
Steve.
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)
I know nothing about scaling in bio-science, but I suspect it might be a bit more waterfall than agile.
Agile is very much the flavour of the week, and lots of people now claim their projects are agile when they are not, but it gets them the tick in the box...
I think my PII Practitioner has lapsed now but I do have the Association of Project Management (APM) Project Management Qualification (PMQ) which is a bit more generic and is a good stepping stone to full APM membership, if that's important. Oh PII needs to be regularly renewed (£), PMQ is a one of for life.
Going back to Prince II, the really important thing which so many people miss is the "tailoring" - adjusting what you do to suit the organisation and the project. My current project is waterfall (construction) and I'm using PII in an almost homeopathic way - it is so diluted that it is effectively impossible to identify any PII in there. The key bits for me are clear board roles and managing by exception. Exec gives me the money and tells me what business outcome I should be aiming for (a building that houses this number of people and when it's needed), Principal or Senior User is responsible for telling me what it should be like (fancy bits, colour pallet and soft furnishings), Senior Supplier that is responsible for my resources (that responsibility is so often overlooked and it often falls to the PM). Then I get on and tell them if/when it goes wrong - and make it their responsibility to decide on the corrective action.
All the other stuff if fluff.
Cheers Gyp and others, Waterfall thats a new one on me. I started this thread asking about Prince 2 , only to be educated there are two other credible options. All comments relayed to my daughter , thanks again.
Ps Gyp what does your lad use for motosickle development?
Steve.
Waterfall is simply that the project is a series of logical steps from start to finish, where agile is working on bits until you decide you've done enough.
Prince is a methodology well suited to delivering waterfall projects.
A hammer, mainly
I've woken up thinking I ought to clarify the waterfall vs agile thing.
There are no doubt thousands of clear descriptions out there so I'll ignore those and write my own.
Waterfall is the "traditional" way of thinking of projects and works pretty well if you think of a building or a battleship. At the start you collect all the requirements, do a big plan and work through it in a sequence until you get to the end.
Business case, collect requirements, design, build, test, commission, tea and medals.
Each part of that could take weeks, months or even years. It was commonly used for computerised system for years. The advantage is that you've agreed what you want in advance, but the disadvantage is that by the time you get it, it might no longer be what you need. It's difficult to stop or change mid project as you've not got a viable project until the end.
Agile is more typically suited to software/app development where you can do product releases regularly. Unlike a battleship which needs to be completed before you push it into the sea, software can be released with incremental changes. Agile typically has a release cycle, so you'd perhaps agree that you'll release a new version once a month.
If you're doing a banking app for example, month 1 release might simply allow you to register and log in, month 2 might allow you to see you current account, month 3 adds savings accounts and tightens login security, month 4 allows you to move money from one account to the next, month 5 allows you to set up direct debits... Because there is a viable product at the end of each month there's the option to stop at that point. But if you are doing more you agree what it is then.
As waterfall projects are typically big commitments where you only get what you wanted at the end, so having a proper governance structure along the lines of that set out in Prince is important as the implication of having to make changes later on is costly and time consuming. You can stop at any time before the end but typically have noting of use to show for it.
Agile projects are far smaller commitments where you can stop at the end of any iteration
Each iteration will be a bit like waterfall where you agree requirements, design, build, test, release etc, but at the end of each iteration you have a viable product and can decide to stop if you feel you've done enough
Because agile projects are typically a series of small commitments, they can be manged with a few lists on a whiteboard. List of requirements, ones we can try to fit in this month, ones that are going in the release. That sort of thing.
I suspect I may have missed a number of critical things and upset the agile purists, but that's the broad difference.
Takes some skill to say all that and not mention MVP :)
Didn't want to confuse things, and perhaps it's because the PMQ exam required writing a lot that I was still of that mindset
OK, with a waterfall, your Minimum Viable Product isn't formed until very late in the project. With Agile, the MVP should appear and be released early on and the rest of the time is spent doing release after release to try and make it work properly :-)
Thanks for taking the time to explain that Gyp, given my daughters companies products are ultimately FDA approved they would appear on paper to be unstoppable juggernauts. However I bet it reality , like software there are modifications and tweakes as pilot production migrates to full stable manufacturing.
Steve.
I’m teasing. As a Prince2 Practitioner, MSP and ISEB PM that had to switch to Agile and DevOps for client work I think you nailed it.
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