Last month, I visited Malvern to speak on 'Making Risk Workshops Work' for the new APM Malvern and Worcester branch. The room was packed out with people who run risk workshops and we had a great time discussing the issues that come up and how to deal with them. You can see the key issues and a lot of great ideas here.

Funnily enough, an unforseen risk almost scuppered the meeting. The hotel where we were due to meet went bust the day before. Luckily the hotel next door honoured our booking. Wendy, the APM administrator, did an amazing job of contacting everyone. It was an interesting practical demonstration that risks are just that - uncertain events!

In the Gulf recently, I came across 'open budget' projects. This wasn't something I'd heard of before. It seems that, for a few organisations in some Middle Eastern countries, the project budget isn't always a constraint. These projects are known as 'open budget projects'.

Now before you all flock to the Middle East to this project nirvana where money isn't a constraint, listen carefully.

The person who told me about open budget projects was very unhappy about them. 'What could possibly be bad about having enough money to do whatever is needed?' you might ask. When I probed a bit deeper, I heard about projects where the requirements were not understood. Instead, the team would buy an expensive, complex, off the shelf system and, when it didn't work and wasn't used, a new project would kick off. I heard of one or two projects in their third or fourth iteration, without having produced anything useful for their end users.

Perhaps budgets are ...

I spent much of my summer pushing a wheelchair around after my other half, Malcolm, broke his achilles tendon in May. He's almost better now but, for a while, he was in plaster from foot to knee. It could have been worse, much worse: many achilles patients were in plaster from foot to hip, so unable to move or take a proper bath for six weeks. What a nightmare that would be!

So how do the doctors decide which patient will have to suffer the long plaster and which ones will have the (much easier to live  with) short plaster? Surely they would use the patient's medical history and work out which one would suit the patient's injury best... you'd hope so. But I was horrified to see a note stuck up in the plaster room. It was a list of consultant surgeons' names with the length of plaster that each preferred their patients to wear. Isn't that terrible? Had my husband seen a different consultant, he would have been in plaster up to his hip. No baths, no car trips (he's 6ft 2in ...

I'm just back from two conferences - presenting http://www.conferencecallsmadeeasy.com/ at the APM conference last week and chairing the PMI's International Project Management Day conference yesterday. Both were fun and informative. The fascinating thing was that the same theme came through very strongly from both conferences: it's people that make projects work, not processes or methodology. They must've been reading my newsletters! Not that I'm against methodolgy... but it just doesn't cut it alone.

A few weeks ago at the Programme Management special interest group (ProgM) in London, I heard a senior programme manager talk about the methodology most people use: PRIDE. Have you heard of that? PRojects In Deep Excrement. I thought that this was really rather funny... until I remembered the time when I had a project that was deep in it. It was incredibly stressful and not at all funny. I can remember it viv ...

Project Management today is seen as a development route to senior positions. So how do you develop tomorrow's project management leaders?
I spent Wednesday last week at Merrill Lynch at a conference looking at just that.

Here are some of the snippets I heard:

BAE Systems have a postgraduate certificate. This really focuses on understanding oneself and others before the core Project Management content. This is followed by a project at work to apply it all. Senior leaders are developed by coaching rather than courses. There were lots of questions around how to measure intangibles!

Geoff Reiss and Martin Price showed how Project Management has been seen to be all rules and process (eg PRINCE2 and PMBOK). However, great project managers are more than this. It is a bit like David Beckham - who doesn't just know the rules but is also a brilliant team player.
Geoff Reiss had a wonderful explanation of how process doesn't always ...

Is Project Management Creative?

Surely yes?

Here's the PMI's definition of a project:
A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.

But when I spoke to some people in the video business recently, they were pretty unimpressed. They're creatives and we're... well, their impression of project people is that we're not. Their experience of project management training in particular left a lot to be desired. They almost gave up on finding appropriate project management training, which had been on their objectives for literally years. All they found was inflexible concentration on prescriptive, controlling processes and methodology.

What a pity! That says something about our too-narrow focus on the control of projects. Let's celebrate the exciting, creative aspect of our roles while embracing enough discipline and governance to ensure success. Making Projects Work Ltd. will ...

A couple of weeks ao, I attended a presentation on PRINCE2 at my local APM chapter. Rob Smith of PMProfessional Learning ran through what the current PRINCE2 structure is. [For those who don't know, PRINCE2 stands for 'PRojects IN a Controlled Environment' and focuses on the processes to control projects.] So what are the gems of ideas from PRINCE2 that we might want to borrow?

1. It's very logical. If you ever want a comprehensive and thought through process for change control or a list of all of the possible risk categories for your project, then the PRINCE2 manual is invaluable.
2. The idea of breaking a project into manageable chunks, which are then planned, managed and executed. These are called stages in PRINCE2.
3. Management by exception. Give people working for you tolerances and leave them alone (at least, don't micro-manage them!) as long as the results are within tolerance as they are delivered.
4. The business case must drive the project, so ...

I suppose that really it's no surprise to me that people-based project management comes into its own when there is a funeral to arrange.

One of the aspects that's been really important for my mother's funeral has been communicating with so many people from around the world. These include those living on boats all around the Atlantic, friends and relations from South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and beyond, as well as all those around Europe. This is where the web has come into its own, despite not everyone in Mum's generation being completely comfortable with it! Allowing people to add their own comments to make the communication two way has been a very important aspect of this.

Here's the page that I set up 

Well, it has been quite a week.

Last Monday, I was looking forward to running my first teleseminar on 'Conference Calls Made Easy'. Then I heard that my mother had died, suddenly, with absolutely no warning. After all, she'd sailed the Atlantic not once, not twice but three times over the last few years.

This means that the teleseminar is now going to run on Monday 14th April at 2pm. Register at www.conferencecallsmadeeasy.com if you'd like to attend or receive the recording afterwards.

Making Project Meetings Work - recently I've been touring the country speaking about how to do just this!

First stop was Derby on 21st January, with an interactive crowd of PMI delegates from companies across the Midlands. Apparently, two of them liked the session so much that they recommended me independently...

So on 29th January, last Tuesday, I presented a keynote at Manchester University! Thank you very much to both of the individuals (one from EDS and one from Rolls-Royce ) who enthused about my session to the Programme Director. The MSc course in Manchester is for practising project and programme managers. They take between three and six years to complete it part time, sponsored by their employee. Talking to one or two people over lunch, it struck me that they were making a huge investment of time and receiving in exchange a unique opportunity to reflect on and improve their practice.

'What really works for

On Monday, I met up with Vanessa Randle of Thinking Visually Ltd. She's a graphic recorder who does amazing visuals of conferences and meetings. We met a year ago and share a passion for the use of graphics with groups to help people (literally) see what they mean. Hand-drawn visuals on big paper is key to the way I work. It's so effective with groups - it's energising in a very visual age. It is my answer to 'Death by PowerPoint'.

We're working together to make sure that people out there who work with groups have access to these tools, whether they are trainers, facilitators, project managers or presenters. We're planning to give away an image library for free, image by image, fortnight by fortnight. Each image will come with a guide to drawing it and tips for using it. This will help people to build up their skills slowly but surely by practising easy but powerful graphic icons. ...

Just over a week ago, I helped out the Pearce Mayfield training team in a village near Wantage. It was great to meet up again with Andrew Rock, Patrick Mayfield and others I've worked with in the past. This group of PRINCE2 and MSP trainers work very hard to ensure that their training appeals to all our communication styles: visual, auditory and kinesthetic, much as I do with meetings. I facilitated a key part of their meeting, using tools such as a table-top group-drawn map and some very large pinboards. According to one of them: "I thought you did an excellent job with us last Friday." Good stuff.

It is rather fun applying trainers' own methods to themselves!