Develop Staff Skills Resource and Build a Community Where Capability is Respected.

Staff need to be able to adapt to new situations quickly, in fact they need the capability to perform many varied tasks. But how do you give them the tools, skills and environment they need to the capable in the situations that they face? And how do you ensure that your organisation has the capacity to meet the demands of modern business?

Capability and resource capacity can be purchased via recruitment of permanent and temporary resources to meet immediate needs. However, it is far more cost effective for organisations to have development programmes in place that grow from within, using resources that already know and understand their business.

Investment in training and development are also an important differentiator for staff satisfaction and impacts successful staff retention and lower recruitment costs as these activities mark the organisation as an employer of choice.

The WorkTrends Survey KRI 2007 shows that employee motivation and their ability to execute tasks can be improved by:

• Setting a clear career path programme
• Goal development and monitoring
• Regular feedback sessions with managers
• Tracking Progress

The survey also shows that by focusing on talent management organisations in six countries* questioned showed their employees were more engaged and more satisfied with their jobs and employer companies over all.
*Countries surveyed UK, USA, Brazil, China, Germany and India.

Use your staff’s potential combined with a programme to build a capability community and your business will see a return on investment and reap quantifiable rewards in terms of an efficient and able workforce.

Building both capacity and capability begins with a common step ~ understanding the current level of skills, knowledge and ability for each employee.

If you would like Maven Training to help you build staff capability and organisational resource capacity please call our team on 020 7403 7100

Project Challenge Exhibition

On the 30th September and 1st October Maven Training will be exhibiting at Project Challenge in Olympia, London.

With around 80 exhibiting organisations, and more than 40 free presentations, this un-missable event provides an unparalleled opportunity to learn from leading industry experts. You will get right up to date with the latest tools, solutions and services at this project event.

If you have previously taken a course with Maven Training, it would be great for you to come and meet us and talk about how everything has been since implementing what you have learnt from your course into your organisation. We can discuss different issues in your organisation at present and find solutions to your needs, just come to stand 29 for a chat about what we can do for each other.

On the 30th September at 12:15pm Zone A, our CEO Melanie Franklin will be presenting to an audience (so get there early) on 'Capacity Building in Project and Programme Management'. This lively, interactive and engaging presentation will focus on increasing individual capacity and maximising available resources to reach and exceed expectations. Then Melanie looks at developing capacity for an organisation as a whole and bringing it all together.

Come and take a seat for an innovative approach to buildiing capacity within organisations where you can hear her views on increasing individual productivity and maximising output.

Tailoring for your organizations wants and needs!

By Andre Palmer, Client Relations at Maven Training

I was at dinner at a random restaurant in central London recently and my friend was asking about project management training for his team. A guy sitting at the table beside us leaned forward and asked whether we were talking about PRINCE2 by any chance and what our thoughts on the methodology were. At that point, it dawned on me that when people talk about project management, they automatically think about PRINCE2.

For the fact that PRINCE2 is easily the most recognized project management method this side of the Atlantic, organizations have put entire teams through PRINCE2 training over the last few years with Maven with the aim of making them more competent. Companies are also taken in by the formal qualification that comes with the training – they see the ‘badge’ as value for money. When all this is stripped away though, organizations have to contend with the fact that a PRINCE2 Foundation and Practitioner qualification per se does not necessarily make project staff manage projects more effectively.

For this reason, more and more corporate clients have been moving towards investing in specially tailored project management workshops/courses to support embedding the PRINCE2 methodology and best practice. Corporate clients are beginning to realize that while PRINCE2 can be used to manage any project under the sun, the real benefits come from its effective implementation in the organization. To this end, organizations are appreciating the section in the new version of the PRINCE2 manual that addresses ‘tailoring’ for example.

We at Maven have been one step ahead of the game for a long time though and have developed hundreds of bespoke events to support the use of PRINCE2 in different project environments for both the public and private sectors. These events have been specifically designed working closely with each client in order to fully understand the level of maturity in the particular project environment so that we are able to yield the greatest possible return on the investment.

We see the PRINCE2 qualification as just the beginning and gone are the days when ‘sheep dipping’ the whole organization was perceived as an effective approach to project management. The real test is whether projects are being delivered on time, within budget and with the forecasted benefits. If an honest assessment shows that your company is ‘failing the test’, then the expertise of Maven training is just what you need.

More on Programme Management

By Melanie Franklin, CEO, Maven Training.

We are getting a lot of demand from clients to help them with their programme management at the moment.

For example, lots of Primary Care Trusts in the NHS are creating new programmes to delivery World Class Commissioning, which means reorganising their internal processes. Other clients are reorganising to save money, and they need to get things done fast.

One of our clients told me the other day "I am not worried about whether we are doing it right – I just need it done. How can we get a cost reduction programme underway and delivering benefits NOW?"

In response, we have created a series of three-hour 'Quick Fix' workshops that cover all the difficult topics – scope and strategic objectives of the programme, defining benefits, being an effective sponsor.

These workshops are defined to get everyone on their feet and contributing their ideas – see the pictures of the ‘workshop in action’!








Are you under pressure to deliver quickly, and are you getting the message that 'we don't mind how, just get it done?' I would love to hear your views.

P3O demystified

Yesterday’s post talked about the connections between P3O, Yin and Yang. If you were left wondering “but what is this P3O thing, then?”, well, you shouldn’t feel alone. Read below for a quick Q&A session with our CEO Melanie Franklin; alternatively, you can listen to our podcasts.


What is P3O?

The term P3O is a play on three Ps (Portfolio, Programme and Project) and one O (Office). Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices are the support structures for Project Management, Programme Management and Portfolio Management.

P3O and P3M3

There is a benchmark for organisations that have a thorough understanding of how to approach Project Management, or have already implemented Programme Management. This benchmark is called “The Maturity Model”, and it helps organisations to understand how mature they are in their Project and Programme Management approaches, as well as to show them what they need to do next to carry on improving.

One of the Maturity Models that is sponsored by the Office of Government Commerce (owners of the PRINCE2®, MSP™ and M_o_R® methods) is called P3M3.

The three Ps stand for Project, Programme and Portfolio, and the three Ms stand for Management Maturity Model. So P3M3 is the Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Maturity Model. The Maturity Model has a number of key questions that an organisation should ask itself to see how well it is doing. One of the factors that has been identified for the organisations that really know their way around Project and Programme Management is the existence of some kind of centralised support structure – and this is the link between P3M3 (the Maturity Model) and P3O (the Support Offices).

Support Structures

There are three support structures: the Portfolio Office, the Programme Office and the Project Office.

Project Office: supports individual projects, often regarded as an administrative function that provides support to the project manager – on creating project plans, attending project meetings, chasing up individual team members on the project to make sure they have done their activities, collating information for progress report, sending that up to the project sponsor.

Programme Office: enables an organisation to support an individual programme, looks at templates of documentation for the projects within that programme, provides support across the projects within the programme, keeps the support at an overall level for the programme so that the programme manager knows, at anyone time, what is happening with all of the projects within a specific programme.

Portfolio Office: a more strategic function as it supports the portfolio of programmes and projects within an organisation. It escalates information about the progress of a specific portfolio and it double checks the direction of that portfolio against the overall strategic direction of the organisation.

Level of Bureaucracy

To avoid an overly bureaucratic approach, it is important that organisations understand what these different levels of support offer them – the advantages and the disadvantages – and select a structure that is right for them.

Level of Authority

One of the key things that an organisation has to do, whether it sets up a portfolio, programme or project office, is to ensure that those providing the support are actually empowered to do so – and this is not just about administration, but assurance services, spotting issues, looking for risks, escalating that information up to the next level of authority. Therefore the project, or programme, or portfolio office has to have the endorsement of senior managers.

P3O Official Site

Bespoke Training – brand new section of our website!

By Melanie Franklin, CEO, Maven Training.

Today sees the launch of our newest online enterprise: the ”Bespoke Services” section of our website. This new division of our website is aimed at providing you with information about our, well, Bespoke Services – that is, what we do and how our expertise can be used to create tailored training events based on specific needs. This new section is a reflexion of the many, many meetings and requests we have received from our clients over the past few years and it was put together to provide clear, straightforward information about what we can do to help other businesses grow.

I am always interested in the requests for help that we receive from our clients, because it gives me a powerful insight into the issues of the moment, so that we can tailor our services to meet these needs. For example, at the moment, a very popular request is for help in establishing how teams or departments can adapt what they have learnt on an MSP™ course into a programme management approach that is developed by one area of the organisation, but shared across it as a whole. There is a definite feeling that creating an approach for programme management leads to more control across the projects that form the programme. This need for control is very popular at the moment. This is because there is real pressure on senior managers to understand the full costs of what they are authorising, and to know that any project they commit to is going to deliver on time. Sticking to budget and deadlines does not happen by magic, so they want to know that those involved know what they are doing, that they are following best practice and that risk across the team/department/organisation has been reduced because there is a systematic, consistent set of processes underpinning the work. I have seen a real upswing in the level of senior management interest in the way projects are managed, and more willingness to become involved in the decision making process. The number of master classes that we are delivering to senior management teams on project, programme and change management is certainly evidence of that. Also, the number of senior managers who are sending themselves on programme management training so that they know how to control the work within their departments is on the increase. Interestingly, they really appreciate attending open courses and mixing with delegates from other organisations, and there are lots of contact details swapped in the coffee breaks.

All of this activity is making me wonder whether sponsoring and managing individual projects is out of fashion and that the controls offered by programme management are fit with the need understand total spending plans across the organisation? What do you think? For more information, go to our ”Bespoke Services” pages to see how we can work with you to devise and implement your approach to programme and project management.