How to build project integrity and certainty in your projects

Peter Mayer, Managing Partner

The search for the holy grail of consistently achieving project certainty continues. And it is surprising the places people are looking. It is understandable that we may ask the question - ‘what are the top 10 project failures’ – and seek to identify and concentrate on the resolution of these issues. Pursuing such an approach, it follows there will be an improvement in an organisations performance but the effort is typically unfocused, inefficient and has a large opportunity cost.

Advertising for a job - expertise or experience?

Neil Richardson, Managing Practitioner

Project (IT Delivery) Manager required to join a large government organisation. We need:

SCRUM development methodology, Certified PRINCE 2, AGILE.
JAVA, Oracle, Weblogic.
Lead direction setting, overall planning, dependency management and risk
mitigation the development cycle.
Integration issues: including RLR, MDS, Release 11, ESB and Infrastructure changes
MS Project; MS Office; Pivotal Tracker.
Extensive project management experience.
Ideally you will be security cleared.

Specific job advertisements for project managers such as this are not unusual. But are the specifics helping or hindering a client find a top-quality PM? What parts do these specific criteria actually play in the likely successful delivery of a project as compared to core project (intelligent) management skills?

The Importance of People

Debra Revens, Managing Practitioner

Research shows that there are ten or eleven main reasons why change programmes fail. These include failure to commit the right resource with the right expertise; management support; the “what’s in it for me” being unclear; poor communications and a low profile of the people issues. In fact, the vast majority of the reasons why change programmes fail relate to people rather than process or technology issues.

Meet Barry Sacks

Barry is a Pelicam Managing Practitioner and has been working with Pelicam for two years. Barry has led a variety of interesting programmes, typically assisting clients to be successful by overcoming the challenges of delivering through multi-sourced partners.

Recent Successful Assignments

Assured the delivery of a technology programme to implement a disaster recovery /
switch over processes for key online web mortgage application processes at UK
retail bank.
Verified the technology and management choices open to a financial client with respect
to non delivery of a technical integration programme.
Customised a business case engagement and governance process for a leading UK
underwriting business.
Provided programme assurance around an organisational change strategy and major technology refresh
programme.

In the news...

We are delighted to report the successful implementation of a highly complex £50M billing replacement programme at one of our mobile and fixed telecoms clients. The new billing system replaces a large number of legacy systems and now manages more than one million customers and 40 regional stores.

We were pleased to announce in our Summer Newsletter that Pelicam have become a fundraising partner for Lifelites.We are now planning a number of adventure activities and events to help raise funds for Lifelites so they can continue to make a world of difference to the lives of terminally ill children in hospices all around the UK by providing a fully maintained technology package.

Lifelites are currently offering us charity passes for a full day of paintballing action and for the more adventurous, the opportunity to experience a thrill of a lifetime by taking part in a fundraising parachute jump from 10,000 feet.

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This newsletter is brought to you by:
Neil Richardson – Managing Practitioner – neil.richardson@pelicam.com
Kate Woodmansee – Marketing – kate.woodmansee@pelicam.com