If you are someone who is a project manager or looking to build a career with such a position, then a PRINCE2 Foundation certification is right up your alley. Such certification will allow you to take a structured approach to project management and help achieve the organization’s goals rapidly. Adopted by several advanced economies like the UK, Europe, and Australia, the PRINCE2 Foundation training is something that will give a serious boost to your career.
However, before jumping into a training module, it’s crucial to understand how a PRINCE2 certification can help. To do this, we must take a look at the top 3 areas where PRINCE2 guidelines can arrest major pitfalls, prevent significant errors, and ultimately keep the business relationships with partners reliable and flexible.
The three important aspects for this are
- Clarity of project scope is better defined
All projects that succeed have one thing in common, and that’s clear, concise, and short-term goals. When you are aware of the end goals of a project, it becomes a lot easier to delegate work and arrest roadblocks as they come during the entire project lifecycle. Contrary to popular belief, even the small act of changing a logo or its color leads to unnecessary delays and wastage of resources. If small things like this keep on happening, it will derail the project before you have gotten your first deliverable out to the client. A couple of tools that PRINCE2 leverages to do away with such delays are :
- Project Initiation Document (PID): As the name suggests, this document outlines the initiation stage of the entire project. It helps if each stage of the project has a PID, but at least one is required according to PRINCE2 guidelines. This will ultimately help you manage the scope and reduce scope creep.
- Forecasting responsibility: Let’s face it. Issues cannot be prevented. What can be done instead is to manage an issue well enough so that it doesn’t escalate into something uncontrollable? The guidelines describe unplanned events that require an intervention by the manager. Following the five steps of CEPDI (Capture, Examine, Propose, and Decide), one can easily manage an issue without letting it affect everyday business.
- Removes micromanagement from the equation
Contrary to popular belief that micromanagement is an issue that plagues young managers, the reality is that every manager tends to micromanage even if they don’t want to. This ‘babysitting corporate culture’ can be dangerous as it robs professionals of their ability to operate independently under duress. PRINCE2 guidelines have a way around by following these two steps :
- Exception management: This means that any escalations should be routed only if the manager is needed. Things like significant deviations from a set process should only qualify, and other issues should be resolved internally. This will give breathing space to the members of the team.
- Communication Management Strategy: This is nothing but a strategy by which information is given out equally to all members of the team. This way, any issues that crop up the CMS will account for the team as well, and the team manager doesn’t have to be updated all the time. With regular team meetings, this information dissemination can be further optimized.
- Sets realistic and achievable timelines
Most of the time, a project fails; it’s because the managers have set very unrealistic deadlines. This is true even with the sales division of any organization. With lofty promises and illogical timelines, the entire project suffers when the team can’t meet them. This not just hampers the project completion date but also gives a wrong impression to customers, stakeholders, and investors. To do away with such overambitious estimates, PRINCE2 foundation certification courses outline two main tools –
- Project planning: A subset of the PID, it details out features of the project’s milestones and deadlines along with deliverables. Proper planning of the project throughout its lifecycle lets you identify control points that can be influenced by the appropriate execution of the project. If the stages of the entire thing are laid out in front, the urge to underestimate the timeline is significantly reduced.
- Project assurance: This is the stage that brings together exceptions and changes management together to complete the project. After the initial few weeks, you might get the impression that the original timeline needs to change. With PRINCE2, you can save the same project plan with a few changes and then leverage them to devise more realistic estimates. The Project Assurance feature of PRINCE2 not only helps you devise these new estimates but also alerts the sponsor or manager so the project can get back on track.
So if you want to make improvements in the way that you handle projects or want to introduce changes to an already established system, then go ahead with a PRINCE2 foundation training as it will truly be worth it.