Project Management

Shifting Minds Limited Registered office: Twyford House, 51 Twyford Avenue, London, N2 9NR, United Kingdom.

Registered Limited Company 05003036 VAT Registration 832 3704 46

E n q u i r y

020 8374 3985

We have worked with:-

Private Sector

Muller

SABMiller

AllianzGI

WPP

West Coast Partnership

Discovery Communications

Marks and Spencer

Manpower

Hays

Brambles

Siegwek

Hitachi Rail

Kaplan Financial

Aircom International

Airwave

Spire Payments

Devonshire

Salt

BPP

TubeLines

Nexen

Cabot Financial

OPC Consultancy

MI Sport

People & Partners

Energise Consultancy

Salt Recruitment

Devonshire Recruitment

Consult HR

Mutual Bank

UK Retail Banks

Merchant Banks

Insurance companies

Engineering companies

High street retailers

Global Management Consultancies

Public Sector

BBC

HMRC

Post Office

NHS

Citizen’s Advice

Basingstoke Council

Ken and Chelsea Council

Northamptonshire Council

East Sussex council

Hampshire Council

City Council

Health authority

3rd Sector

Marie Curie Cancer Care

Prostate Cancer UK

Royal College of Nursing

City and Guilds

YMCA

ABE

Family Housing

Peabody Trust

World Animal Protection

Where's the updated project plan?

When you look below the surface of many organisations there is a surprising lack of good project management practice. The symptoms of this are as follows-

Projects being initiated in many parts of the organisation without a clear link between their objectives and the organisation's overall strategy

Projects being launched without a clear sponsor, and with only partially articulated definitions of scope, business case, resources and timescales

Projects being planned on unsuitable tools e.g. Word, Excel or in the worst cases not really being planned at all!

A culture where projects that rarely progress according to the project plan; and organisations as a whole that have only poor expectations of on-time /on budget completion

A culture where it is okay not to complete an allocated task on time; and a culture where project managers have only limited powers to influence task completion

If these are some of the problems, some of the solutions can also be problematic. There are a number of excellent project management approaches/frameworks, the best known (in the UK) being Prince2 and MSP. The challenge for many organisations is deciding how much project management discipline is required for their projects and programmes within their context? Exposure to a formal approach can leave a part-time project manager (managing a small to medium scale projects) bewildered by the number of templates he or she would be expected to complete!

Part-time project managers often have limiting beliefs about setting up, planning and implementing projects. There are examples: –

It’s my job to produce and maintain the project plan. We believe that the whole project team needs to be involved in the creation of the first plan, and needs regular exposure to the plan

Team members will tell me their problems. We believe that in the early stages of a project (when people are shy and guarded) it is unlikely that they will naturally raise all of their concerns about the direction of the project and more importantly about their capacity to deliver their tasks.

I don’t really expect team members (especially senior people) to deliver their tasks on time. We believe that if the project set up has been done correctly it is absolutely okay for a project manager to expect the on-time, and to specified quality delivery of tasks!

The people are being given to do this work are not up to scratch – therefore I will have to do the work myself, or the project will slip! We believe that project managers must be decisive, proactive and in some ways obsessed with the delivery of the project now managing!

Our thinking at Shifting Minds is that organisations who do not manage their projects effectively are losing a huge potential operational/competitive advantage. When we work with organisations we review and influence their project management mind set and culture, we help them build pragmatic project management policies and frameworks and critically we help project managers to become very effective.

Project Management

We provide the following training programmes:-

Project Management Skills

This programme can be run in a number of formats and durations (from 0.5 days for an overview) and up to three days for in-house part-time or full time project managers

We also provide facilitated sessions to support new or existing projects

Project start up sessions

In these facilitated sessions we achieve a number of goals:-

We help the project team produce their first workable and fully resourced project plan

We help the team to agree their project management controls and delivery approach

We help the team explore the soft issues surrounding the project e.g. project team style, change management issues and reporting approaches

Project re-invigoration “Hothouses”

We also provide first class consultancy - to help you build an effective and pragmatic project management approach

For more information, call us now on 020 8374 3985 or email office@shiftingminds.com