I have just completed my first PRINCE2 Training Course in New Zealand.  I lived in Auckland for 8 years and have married a Kiwi. So it’s always good to visit “my second home”.

The course was actually in Wellington, which is a very pleasant city although I recommend that you undertake professional endurance training before attempting the steep hills carrying  a laptop and a full compliment of PRINCE2 manuals and course materials.

As always, the highlight for me  of the 5 day PRINCE2 training course was the opportunity to discuss the projects with my clients. As has become increasingly common, what started as a conversation about pure project management quickly veered into people and change management. This once again shows how PRINCE2 and Change Management Training are very complementary.

I recommend a stroll down Cuba St on a sunny  Saturday morning, but an enduring memory will be the sublime fish and chips in the clients’s staff canteen at Friday lunchtime. Access is through security gates so it is not possible for many people to experience this, but if it were publicly available it would probably win international awards.

Ever tried to build and maintain a project plan across multiple sites by emailing copies of MS Project? I have and it’s not pretty.

Liquid Planner is one of  growing number of online services that allow collaboration on projects across the internet. Unlike  many of these services, this one comes with a strong planning tool and uses this as focus for its structure.  Basically this solves the problem above; managing a complex plan between several sites. It brings other features as well, but is it just too clever?

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I have just given a course in facilitation. Most people on the course were either Business Analysts or Project Managers.

I might be a bit slow, but I have just connected the dots……this is an important, perhaps critical, skill for  Project Managers. How often do we lead wokshops  for planning, risk analysis, problem solving etc? If you count up all the person hours, workshops can be expensive and we need to make them as effective as possible.

Facilitation is about setting clear objectives, selecting the right processes and using the combined intelligence and experience of the group to reach those objectives. If done well, it is hugely powerful in solving problems, creating ownership and building the team. If done badly, it will lead to frustration, disunity and poor problem solving.

There is a lot out there written about good facilitation but how many Project Managers know that is exists?

This is the process we use at Project Laneways. We lso use it as the basis for our training in facilitation.

This is a collection of useful short articles and links. It tries to collect together the thoughts of people who actually practice Project Management and Change Management.

Read more about Prince 2 Training

(Note: There will be another soon about free project control software)

You will have heard of and, possibly used, MSProject. This is Microsoft’s project planning tool. It allows you to enter a series of activities, describe who can do them, how long they will take, and whether they need to come in a certain order (dependencies). In other words you can use it to create a project plan.

However, there are a number of free to use project planning tools available on the Internet. Here are a few of them.

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