Imperative for organizations to improve project management practices prompts AXELOS to take PRINCE2® training to North American trainers
The urgency needed to give North American organizations greater knowledge and methods to realize the benefits of projects has accelerated AXELOS’ plans to expand take-up of its project management best practice guidance in the region.
AXELOS – custodians of PRINCE2®,the de facto standard for project management, used by more than one million professionals worldwide – has brought its “Train the Trainer” sessions to Chicago this month. The aim is to enable training organizations to deliver PRINCE2 Practitioner courses to project management professionals and help them understand how the best practice complements the PMBOK® Guide from the Project Management Institute (PMI).
AXELOS’ decision to take the free of charge, five-day course to North America at the start of 2015 builds on a 35% growth in PRINCE2 in the USA last year while reflecting what PMI’s most recent Pulse of the Profession report calls the “imperative for organizations to take action now…to optimize project management practices to mitigate millions [of dollars] lost on failed projects.”
Frances Scarff - Chief Product Officer of AXELOS said: “As highlighted in the PMI report, there are a variety of serious project management failings among organizations in the US and around the world that can be addressed by people having the right skills and methods to achieve the benefits that projects should be delivering.
“PRINCE2 Practitioner is a project management approach designed to address many of the failings the PMI report identifies, such as the lack of projects aligned to business strategy, organizations losing money as a result of project activity and a woefully low number of those achieving project benefits.”
Some of the most arresting findings in the 2014 report include the $109m loss for every $1bn organizations are spending on projects and programmes and the fewer than one in five (17%) of them reporting high benefits realization maturity.
Scarff added: “If organizations are going to develop the necessary skills and understanding to make project management valuable, they need to generate significant improvements in people, processes and outcomes, as the PMI report recommends. PRINCE2 provides answers to this challenge, while complementing the knowledge that the PMBOK® Guide offers.”
AXELOS’ PRINCE2 Practitioner course also provides the necessary grounding ahead of the launch of a new best practice guidance, PRINCE2 Agile, in the second half of 2015. This new approach will blend the best of established project management and agile approaches and also tackle another of the organizational issues pinpointed in the PMI report: the lack of organizational agility. Only 15% of organizations reported a high level of agility in their activities despite 20% more organizations that adopt an agile approach completing a greater part of their strategies.
The PRINCE2 Practitioner courses will be hosted by Michelle Rowland, the PRINCE2 Chief Examiner. They are classroom based and will be followed by an exam and a full day of useful practical training tips and workshops.
To become an accredited PRINCE2 trainer candidates must have:
- The PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification
- Three years’ practical experience working in project management
- Minimum ten days’ experience delivering classroom based training. This could be under instruction or training in any other best practice guidance.
The first course will be in held in Chicago from 26 - 30 January with additional courses in Los Angles from 2– 6 March and Ottawa, Canada from 16 – 20 March. Applications for a place on one of these sessions or enquiries about future Train the Trainer sessions, may be made by e-mail to Lex Barber, AXELOS Global Events Manager, at [email protected].