Cycling the Fakenham 50k on Sunday gave me thinking time to work on the rough outline of a blog piece on programme management. Why that topic? Because last week I found myself re-immersed in the world of Terms of Reference, Project Initiation Documents, version control, project dashboards with RAG ratings, Programme Boards requiring regular presentations in a specified format and so on.
I raised the possibility that as my work-stream is on change we could tackle all this with less formality, and in doing so demonstrate change in action. In response, I got 'Good luck with that one'.
Ho hum. I've dusted down my Managing Successful Programmes course notes, started re-learning the vocabulary and acronyms and turned my sights from the different world of sense-making, story-telling and emergence.
What's interesting about this time's immersion into the project world is that, since I was last in it big time, it's absorbed another approach – Agile. So not only is there the original language and requirements, there is the new language and requirements of sprints, daily stand-ups, scrum masters, backlogs, and the rest of it, including the use of boxes of post-notes. Fortunately, I have been close to the Agile world in the last couple of years, so have a good working knowledge of how it goes – for good and for learning from failure.