It’s the first day of EDUCAUSE 2017 in Philadelphia and Michio Kaku took us on a mental journey to a possible version of a digitised future. This got us thinking about what the project management profession may be like in his version of the future. In his presentation Michio, a theoretical physicist and futurist, proposed […]

The Project Management Office (PMO) in Project Services offers full-day project management training courses, but many of our staff find it difficult to free-up that amount of time in their busy diaries.  So the PMO has developed a series of ‘bite-size’ lunchtime sessions that staff are able to more easily incorporate into their working day. […]

Watching the BBC programme “Forces of Nature” made me think about why the challenges of “Annual”  Projects should not be under-estimated. The programme explained that as the Earth travels around the sun – it never, ever returns to the same place. Even the orbit of the earth isn’t “annual” in the way I thought it […]

One of the questions that we’re often asked here in Project Services is “when is a project not a project?” or to be more specific “when is it worth treating a piece of work as a project & when isn’t it?”. Sometimes the answer is fairly obvious – if it’s a small and simple piece of work, taking just […]

Why did we develop these resources? We saw the advantages of using Agile techniques, but the established frameworks didn’t sit well with our existing project processes. We cherry-picked the elements of Agile that we felt would work for us and pulled them together into our own take on Agile.  We’ve learned from our experiences over the last  years and we are […]

Typically we have many more ideas for projects than we have resources to execute them. We need some simple processes to determine what projects to take on. Agreeing priorities for your projects when you have multiple different stakeholders can be difficult – comparing the relative priorities of new and in-flight projects can be even more […]

In my role as Head of Project Services I’m often asked about what tools and approaches we use for project management in IS Applications. These questions have become more frequent since I became Chair of the UCISA Project and Change Management Group in 2014 see https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/pcmg.aspx. This is the first of an occasional series of […]