PRINCE2 2009 Corporate Briefing

Yesterday we held our PRINCE2 2009 Corporate Briefing at the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum. We wanted to hold the event somewhere different, and we were not disappointed. The Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum is a fantastic meeting venue. We had three reasons for choosing it:

• It's in the basement of the HM Treasury, the department that the owners of PRINCE2 (OGC) belongs to. In fact they occupy parts of the 6th floor
• My grandfather worked their during WWII as an electrician
• We liked it!

24 people attended our briefing representing the following organisations: APM London Branch Chairman, Bid2Win, BT, Cambridge University Press, Cancer Research, Change Director, Cheshire ICT Services, Computacenter, Creative Inn, FujiFilm, Lloyds Registers, Lingo, London Underground, Meat Hygiene Services, Nicholls Group, Oxfam, PearceMayfield, PM4NGO and Sun Microsystems.

The event focused on what organisations need to do to 'upgrade' to PRINCE2 2009 to get the most value from the revised method. We had some interesting discussions over the excellent lunch provided by our hosts at the war rooms - they even gave everyone a ration book as place settings!

The upgrade discussions included:

• Understanding current PRINCE2 assets in the organisation
• Understanding current levels of maturity and any underlying issues
• Developing the business case for upgrading
• Briefing Project Board members using the new directing guide (including training by stealth!)
• Retraining of PM with existing PRINCE2 certification
• Updating templates
• Updating processes and tools
• Deciding when to switch over projects to the revised method
• What aspects of the revised method can be immediately deployed (e.g. the principles)

There was a lot of discussion around learning lessons - so I've decided that the 'learning from experience' principle will be the subject of my next blog!