Home  |  Contact & Brochures  |  e-learning guides

Project Management

• About the Partnership
• Project Management
  • Case Study
  • Workshop Programme
  • Project Without Tears
  • e-learning guide
• Managing Change
• Consultancy Skills
• Five e-learning guides

 

Project Management Case Study

The Department of Health was introducing programme management to implement changes in the Health Service. To support this we designed and ran a series of two-day workshops. Key design principles were:

• Tailored for policy and organisational projects rather than capital or IT projects.
• A project management approach suited to "accidental" project managers - those who must carry out real day-to-day work as well as undertaking projects.
• Transfer of the ideas and approaches into normal day-to-day work.

And the Outcomes: Over eight hundred Department of Health civil servants have attended the workshops - from junior staff to Senior Civil Service grades. The workshops were very well regarded indeed - 97% rated them as excellent/very good.

• Staff and managers became convinced of the relevance that project management has to the work that they carry-out, and the practical benefits it can deliver.
• There are now numerous cases of the approaches being transferred into daily work. Some groups requested extra support.
• During the workshops over two hundred projects have been scoped and planned.
• Gradually, some basic "groundrules" are developing and being employed as to how projects are best sponsored and managed in the Department.
• This has been by a supported by our "helpnote" available both as a booklet and from the Department's intranet.

Our Approach

First we carried out a design stage, assessing learning needs through discussions with the key stakeholders. This involved discussions with staff development, focus groups with likely delegates, interviews with selected managers, and discussions with ISD who already employed project management for IT projects. This led us to think in terms of  "foundation" training, tailored specifically for policy staff.

Next, we designed the training. Key design principles were:

• Tailored for policy/organisational projects rather than technical (capital or IT) projects.
• A project management backbone with change management features added.
• Suited to "accidental" project managers - those who must carry out real day-to-day work as well as undertaking projects.
• Focus on the early stages of "setting-up and planning" projects
• Delegates testing and trying the approaches on their own real projects.

The resulting design was a workshop which covered the key approaches and techniques on the first day, leaving the second day available for the course to work in groups using the approaches to "scope and plan" participants' real live projects. See Workshop Programme for more details.

Our subsequent work delivering the programme over the following four years, had three elements:

1. Foundation Training, where we delivered some eighty "foundation" workshops for mixed audiences of policy staff and managers, revising the original design as we progressed. This was boosted from the original contract by the senior management initiative on project and programme management.  
2. Customised Workshops, run at request for distinct units such as the Mental Health Act Commission, Health Improvement & Prevention, and Children's Services Programme, focussing on their own particular issues. We also led "project surgeries" to help a specific project team to plan and organise their own project.  
3. DOH Project Management Framework, through materials supplied both in the form of the workshop manual but also a "helpnote" we wrote to be available both as a booklet and from the Department’s intranet.

Sparrowhawk

National Geographic

   Copyright Lindsay Sherwin 2009