Learning Conversations

As you'll know from my previous post, I've spent the last week on a rather intensive Prince2® training course.

It was an interesting experience...

It was the first time I've done a course that was solely focussed on the exam at the end of it since my degree (and that one wasn't a pleasant experience). But this course was only four days long, followed by a 2 1/2 hour in-depth, but open-book exam of our understanding of the concepts.

I've always had mixed feelings about exams, but I think this one really worked as an assessment method. Mainly because it was open-book, so it really was testing how well we understood how the Prince2 principles, themes, management products and processes all fitted together.

Where the course fell down (and this is no reflection on the provider, as it's just the nature of this particular qualification), is that there was no space to explore with each other how Prince2 could really work in practice.

I really felt like I could do with another couple of days after the exam to work through some case studies or simulations. Or, even better, one of my own projects.

But Prince2 is designed to be tailored to specific projects, so what works for one person wouldn't necessarily work for someone else.

So, the next few weeks and months are going to be a bit of a "journey" to make Prince2 fit my own projects, with guidance from those people around me who are more experienced...

Thankfully I'm in a place where Prince2 is pretty much embedded already (so I now realise), so there are a lot of people I can call on! They have been warned!

The other thing I was thinking about was how people using Prince2 would benefit very much from a hyperlinked version of the OGC manual. There's a lot of flicking backwards and forwards, but with little cross-referencing to help. If anyone knows of an existing site please let me know.

And finally, as I was working through the material I kept thinking about how useful it would be to have a piece of software (preferably web-based) that helped project managers to manage all the processes. It wouldn't necessarily have all the pieces within it (eg. there are already very good quality, document, planning and configuration management tools that would just need an interface) but it would provide a central location (a portal even) for the project team to see their view on the project.

The only one I'm aware of is Aspyre, which is very good, but I'd be interested to know what else is out there - especially if it was open source.