2008 APM Project Management Conference

The APM Project Management Conference is an interactive forum bringing together project management professionals and key decision makers across the public and private sector. It aims to set out and debate key subjects on the national project management agenda.

Bob Warner, Chief Executive, Remploy

Chris Hodson, Principal Consultant, CITI

Major change in a publicly exposed and politically charged environment is always a challenge, particularly when there are sensitive issues at stake.

Changing the face of Remploy, the United Kingdom’s leading provider of employment and routes to work for the disabled community, was a complex and challenging task with multiple risks of failure.

Understanding the sources of complexity, and taking steps to bring them within manageable bounds, was crucial to making the whole programme manageable and achievable. This session illustrates how a systematic approach can be applied to the analysis and management of complexity, increasing the chances of success in major change programmes.

David Tuffs, Director, Brookfield Initiatives Ltd

Thomas Docker, Chairman, CITI

Agile project management methods are being proposed as a breakthrough approach to reducing the dependency on classical (waterfall) product development and standard project management practices, which together are perceived as cumbersome, labour intensive, unproductive in the early parts of a project and inflexible in the later parts.

In this paper, we argue that much of what is in most agile project management methods has always been available for organisations to use; we just called it something else. The ‘agilists’ have ‘borrowed’ what good software engineers have known for years, then put new language around it. And we have now reached the point where the word ‘agile’ itself conjures up negative connotations for some senior managers, when it is they who should be sponsoring any change.

However, opinions vary in the agile community. We support Jacobson’s view that agile is just a set of practices (forget about agile methods), but we have simpler views about how to implement this idea.