The PRINCE2™ wars in Britain offer vital lessons for South Africa

There is a battle being fought for the hearts and minds of our project management community – and it is going to affect both the future project performance and our financial success in the world markets. It is a strange battle, with unexpected alliances, and it is all the more worrying for its stealth.

So who are the combatants?

In the red corner is the main player, a company confusingly called the APM Group. Confusing because it has no connection with the United Kingdom-based Association for Project Management (APM), and has no mandate from the project management community.

The APM Group, hired by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) to manage the accreditation of trainers and training companies to deliver PRINCE2™ and Managing Successful Programmes (MSP™) courses, is promoting method accreditation as though it is a project management qualification – as if knowing a method makes you a project manager.

PRINCE2™ is a good method, and MSP™ benefits from being the only widely documented programme management approach; but to confuse it with project management is akin to believing that knowing how to do double-entry bookkeeping makes you a qualified accountant.

And, for commercial reasons, many of the authorised training organisations that have invested substantial sums of money buying accreditation are promoting the same message.

In the blue corner are organisations that include the APM, some of the progressive universities – in particular Middlesex (which has established the National Centre for Project Management), the University of Manchester (a merger between the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) and Lancaster – and a small number of project management companies, all of which are dedicated to developing professional project management.

These ‘blue’ organisations know that high-performance project management is a critical success factor for UK plc, and are seeking to put in place a set of qualifications, which means that those with them can run projects – safely and predictably.

It has taken time and much research, some funded by the national and international project management associations, to develop a consistent view about what makes a good project manager.

There remains work to be done, but consensus is swiftly growing about their attributes, and hence a professional curriculum and valid assessment criteria can be created.

So what is the problem?

It is the difference between education and training.

Not sure what the difference is? Simply check your reaction to your child coming home and saying he/she had sex training rather than sex education at school today!

The ‘reds’ claim that some 50 000 individuals sit the PRINCE2™ tests every year, while the ‘blues’ would be hard-pressed to find 5 000 taking advanced project management qualifications worldwide.

We need to worry that the personal development budget for future project managers is being consumed by training programmes, when this money could be better spent in educating them in project management.

Senior executives want people skilled at running projects. People skilled at running projects are distinguished by their attitudes, their skills, the responsibilities they intuitively accept, and the tasks and procedures they follow.

It is a well-researched finding that the best predictor of project performance is level of previous project experience. None of these are the outcomes from the typical five-day accreditation training course, including two days of tests.

As any experienced trainer knows, it is much easier to get a 20-something through method accreditation that focuses on vocabulary and knowledge of procedures, than a more experienced individual; the inexperienced do not see the confounding factors that have to be taken into account.

What project management education does, is develop judgement and attitudes.

It focuses on disciplines, not procedures, and forces focus on the factors that lead to success in projects.

There is a place for procedures. They are the distilled wisdom from hundreds of man years of others’ experience, but they are not rules, they are guidance; something that someone – whose only exposure to project management is a method course and anecdotal experiences, shaped by that method – rarely grasps.

Therein lies a real threat to project management development. As has been observed in many organisations, the only difference between a methodologist and a terrorist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist…

What to do then?

The first and most important thing is to make the case for developing project management expertise, rather than project method expertise.

The major project management organisations, such as the APM, the International Association of Project Managers (IAPM) and the Project Management Institute (PMI), must make their cases much clearer and deliver to the marketplace clear guidelines about what good project management education should look like.

Both the APM and the PMI have long-standing entry-level knowledge programmes that are preferable starting points for project management education, but they suffer from many of the same faults as the method accreditation courses, with a public image that attaining these underwrites some sort of professional status in project management when they patently do not.

In the UK, the OGC – with its clear mandate to improve project management in the government sector – must clearly associate itself with providers of project management education and promote this at least as heavily as it has for method accreditation.

And project managers who value their contribution to their organisation and to their country should demand loud and clear that they are professionals and expect professional status with all that comes with it: recognition, responsibility and qualifications.

After all, the Olympics are coming: The demand for advanced, high-performance, professional project management in all spheres will be at a premium, and we are not going to get it from individuals who are expert in PRINCE2™, but cannot project-manage.

Dr Christopher Worsley

Published in “PM Today” (2006)

This article was first published in the UK some five years ago and generated a large amount of comment and debate.

The battleground continues in the UK and has been extended now to include the PMI.

As was claimed by several of the speakers at the Project Management South Africa Conference in Johannesburg in 2010, the PMI has, even more controversially, threatened to take the UK Association for Project Management to court to prevent it from gaining chartered status. An action that it is difficult not to ascribe to organisational protectionism rather than any theoretical or ethical desire to promote project professionalism.

With PRINCE2™ beginning to compete with the PMI’s Project Management Professional credential in South Africa, and the debate generated by the Services Sector Education and Training Authority around project manager licensing, it is time for us in South Africa to consider carefully what we want from our profession.

Frankly, the whole-scale adoption of method and PRINCE2™ by the UK government was a costly and ill-founded venture. Method was oversold and was confused with capability.

Training and human resources departments succumbed to the seductive argument that they could simply outsource their project management development problems by sending project managers on a week’s training course and the issue would be solved.

In research looking at the overall capability of project managers by sectors, it was found that the UK government showed good procedural understanding of project management, but lagged behind other sectors in terms of overall capability to run complex projects.

In addition, little understanding has been given to the problem that PRINCE2™ adoption is an organisational change initiative. Individuals coming back from courses are frustrated by their inability to make use of their learning in organisations that are not prepared (or, in many cases, not even aware of the implications) for the new way of governing and managing projects.

The problem of overemphasising the impact of training is recognised and well documented in research by people such as Lynn Crawford, who showed there was little correlation between accredited individuals and their capability to run complex projects.

This makes last year’s policy change by the APM Group, to require project managers to retake the PRINCE2/MSP™ exam every five years, even more inexplicable.

Can you imagine the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants expecting a finance director to retake the entry-level accounting exam every
five years?

Such a move demonstrates either extreme naivety about professional development or blatant commercialism.

With the UK marketplace flooded with PRINCE2™ project managers, where will the APM Group’s fees continue to come from as exam entries decline? No wonder markets such as Asia and Africa are of such interest to the Group.

The APM and the IAPM promote an approach based upon a tiered professional recognition framework that puts increasing emphasis on validated experience in the field. This makes much theoretical sense, when you consider competence in terms of knowledge, attitudes and behaviours, skills and experience (KASE).

Research here suggests that project management capability matures from intuitive, through process and procedural understanding to judgement and the ability to deal with complex situations.

The APM approach caters for knowledge assessment for the apprentice (APM base qualification) through assessment of competence (the APM Practitioner is a form of assessment centre) through to experience and peer review at the most senior fellowship level.

However, the approach is not without its critics.

Every year, at its prestigious annual conference, the APM provides awards for project and programme management.

This year, in line with previous years, the majority of the awards went to construction and engineering related projects.

The Project of the Year and Project Manager of the Year awards have most commonly gone to high-profile, large construction projects.

Does this mean project management in business, in information technology or in other spheres is not ‘real’ project management, and that these sectors do not warrant high-performing project management?

At the PMSA Conference in Johannesburg, members of the PMI International Committee put forward the argument that there was no such thing as a project management profession, but rather project management was a skill that varied by domain area.

They argued for domain-by-domain project manager recognition, citing the British Computing Society (now known as BSC – The Chartered Institute for IT) as the role model.

In BCS, project management is recognised as one component of being an IT professional. But, surely, this is a backward step?

Far too often, failing projects are in the hands of technophiles who have no empathy or appreciation of the management’s concerns.

Our own research suggests that the key factor, alongside experience, in KASE is attitudes and behaviours – and these factors are consistent across sectors.

The more complex the project, the more important it is to have a project manager with the appropriate all-round profile. Technical domain specialist project managers should stick to lower complexity projects or projects where the primary source of complexity is technical in nature.

So how do we in South Africa learn from the experiences in other countries and set our own agenda because, most certainly, we must?

Here is our suggested starter:

• Recognise commercial pressures for what they are and ensure the approach taken really does have the best interests of the profession at heart;
• Promote professional development as a sustained individual and organisational change process;
• Listen to the project community – all the community; and
• Put excellence in project management – in every sector – at the heart of our mission. 

Louise & Christopher Worsley

Projman

E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

References

Crawford, L. (2005). “Senior management perceptions of project management competence.” International Journal of Project Management, 23, 7–16.

Worsley, L. (2009). “The characteristics of successful project managers: insights from across sector profiling of project managers.” Australian Institute of Project Management. Modernisation in Project Management. Sydney.

Leonard, D., & Willis, L. (2000). “Is project manager capability domain specific?” Congress2000 proceeding. London.