APM Blogs

David Thomson, APM head of external affairs, offers a view of the Autumn budget:  The famous lines of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade seem apt for the predicament the Chancellor faced in the run up to this Budget: “Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death,  Into the mouth of hell Rode the six hundred” Not just literally from left and right but also from competing views on how to handle finances ahead of Brexit and its impact, as well as wider volleys from different directions on priorities for his (relatively few) spending options.

We're all familiar with the triple project constraints of time, cost and scope and there's been plenty of debate about whether other constraints should be factored in to the constraint triangle but I'd like to take a step backwards and consider whether "constraint" really is the right description and whether we, as a profession, could better describe how a project is actually constrained and what we really mean by the "triple constraints".

In this era of rapid advancement in digital technologies, we’re used to over-hyped and superlative-laden announcements for new innovative products that promise to transform our lives.

Like any good project manager, I thought it might be worthwhile to start this blog series with a good old-fashioned kick off.

By Dr Jim Dale Some thirty-five years ago, naive and fresh faced, with my head full of management theories from Maslow, Hertzberg, Adair and McGregor, I embarked upon my first leadership role with the Metropolitan Police.

Recently I was given the challenge of running a session at the APM Women in Project Management conference on how to raise your profile for promotion.

Long ago a 16 year old version of myself told my dad that I was not going to go into “data processing” or become a programmer or follow the same technical path he did.

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing mankind, but what is the profession of project management doing about it? There are important exceptions but by and large the profession is fairly quiet on the subject.

The increasingly distant horizons associated with many of our major projects and programmes present a raft of well-documented problems: the continually shifting environment; the onward march of technology; the loss of expertise, experience and corporate memory as some of these very long projects outlive the teams that manage them, several times over.

Whilst two of the key statements within the agile manifesto are “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “Working software over comprehensive documentation”, anybody coming to the conclusion that this removes the need for strong project discipline or governance would be misguided.