Sulkyblue's Blog

A little while ago I spent a week on a PRINCE2 course, getting my Foundation and Practitioner qualifications. I had a pretty low opinion of PRINCE2 going in and didn’t feel optimistic that the course could teach me much about being a good project manager, just about the very specific language and structure that PRINCE2 uses. I was solely doing the course to get the qualification, which a lot of jobs ask for.

I dutifully did the pre-reading of the hefty manual that was assigned to me, covering both the general overview and the introductions to the various themes, principles and processes that make up PRINCE2. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself thawing. The overall introduction gave a really good description of what project management should be about and the building blocks that should make it up. I found myself nodding along to a lot of it, what they were saying tallied with a lot of what I think and how I manage projects, I’d just never taken such pains to carefully structure and document my methods.

Then I went on the course itself and all my original concerns were verified.

The week long course is divided into two, the first half leading up to the Foundation exam on the Wednesday afternoon, and the second half going into a bit more detail for the practitioner exam on the Friday afternoon. In our group of ten, half were only doing the foundation exam.

The training is all about preparing you, or rather, the class as a whole, to pass the exams. Our group had quite a range of abilities and the focus of the trainer was (quite rightly) on bringing the members of the group who were struggling up to a level that they could hope to get pass marks (50% for foundation, 55% for practitioner). That meant that those of us that weren’t struggling were a bit neglected and consequently quite bored – there was no interest in helping us get from 75% to 90%.

Both exams were multiple-choice. The foundation is a closed book, with 70 individual and entirely random questions involving how the different project stages progress, what different bits of documentation are, when they are produced who signs them off. The training was focussed on helping people remember everything, there was quite a lot of rote reciting and repeatedly asking the same question until you could respond without thinking. The practitioner exam in contrast allows you to take your annotated manual in, and although the questions are again multiple-choice they are a lot more complex and inter-related, all framed around actually applying PRINCE2 to a specific scenario. The day-and-a-half of training for this involved going through two sample papers and discussing answers.

The thing is multiple choice questions offer very little scope for really thinking about a problem. They have to have a right answer and several wrong answers, there’s no space for you to explain your thinking and for the examiner to see that although you’ve arrived at a different answer it’s still based on entirely correct reasoning. Our trainer actively encouraged not working out the right answer, but eliminating wrong answers until only one remained.

This makes project management sound as if it’s black and white, right actions and wrong ones. But that’s a load of crap – 8 times out of 10 project management is about finding the compromise that’s just least wrong. In fact when I was pushing our trainer to explain why one answer was right over another, more than once he replied that both answers could be right but “B was more right than C”. Fine, but I should get the bloody mark for C then shouldn’t I?

None of this is really the fault of PRINCE2 itself, which does exactly what it sets out to do - create a framework for one way in which you can structure a project. It explicitly states that it’s not about the techniques you will use, or the skills or leadership qualities that you will need and that you must always tailor PRINCE2 so that the scale is suitable for the project and organisation in question.

The fault lies in the way that PRINCE is examined and trained, and the way that its qualification is marketed. Presenting this as project management training is a disservice to the profession of project management, to the people taking the course and for the projects that these people will be associated with. You do not come out of this course being able to do anything more than pass a multiple-choice exam, which is only really a useful skill in a universe where time pauses every time you have to make a decision and a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire style set of options flash before your eyes, pre-selected by some benevolent deity.

Project management is messy and complicated. While a pre-established framework like PRINCE2 can be extremely valuable, there are a lot of issues outside of the scope of PRINCE2 – how do I get *everyone* involved to actually follow the PRINCE2 framework? How do I decide how long to make my product descriptions? What questions do I have to ask a customer to find out what it is that they *really* want? How do you tell your chief executive that it isn’t acceptable to change their mind randomly in the middle of projects?

I’ve worked on a fair few projects in my day as project manager, customer and producer, and although I have to admit I’ve never worked on one that’s strictly PRINCE2 I’ve worked on a number that have had very strict project management processes. Those processes were often a massive help, forming structure and shared understandings and expectations. However when applied blindly they can be a disaster – angry customers who don’t see why they should follow someone else’s processes when they don’t synchronise with their own, project managers so protective of specifications they lose their flexibility and risk management that becomes more about filling in the boxes on a risk register than it does about actually being worried and doing something. I’ve been in all these situations, on both sides of the fence and I’ve learnt from every single one of those experiences.

The biggest thing I’ve learnt is that, shockingly, everyone only cares about themselves, no one gives a rats ass about your process except for you. Your process has to be as invisible as possible, when you force someone to do something your way, it has to be for a really good reason, saying “because that’s the way PRINCE2 says to do it” isn’t going to persuade anyone to jump through a hoop. Instead you have to be able to explain why it’s in their interest in the long run – locking down specifications in advance will mean confidence in estimates, careful risk analysis may allow minimal action in advance to reduce the possibility of serious problems later on.

All of that is in PRINCE2 somewhere, years of development and experience has gone into developing the framework, and I’m sure that there’s an excellent reason for every single hoop. But none of that is covered in the training, whenever I asked *why* PRINCE did something in a particular way the trainer looked at me like I was asking to derive a formula from first principles - if it's not on the syllabus, why do you need to know it?

But project management should not be treated as a theoretical subject, it's a set of practical skills backed up by experience. Project management is not simple, it cannot be taught in a week and it cannot be assessed using a multiple choice 2.5 hour exam; the assumption that it can be is exactly why so many projects fail.