Home / Insights
Insights
Notes from the practice — on service management, governance, audits and the parts of improvement work that nobody puts in the proposal.
Ensure continued business justification: the Emergency Services Network and the milestone that meant nothing
A supplier had been paid for 85 per cent of its contractual milestones by value while the network remained undelivered. Ten years late and still running, ESN is the clearest available lesson in what happens when a business case stops being tested.
August 22, 2026Sustainability became a project variable. Now somebody has to set a tolerance on it
PRINCE2 7 added a seventh performance aspect and nobody quite knows what to do with it. A tolerance you cannot breach is not a tolerance — it is a hope. Here is how to make sustainability behave like the other six, and why Indian boards will ask about it before your project board does.
August 8, 202631 December 2026: the PRINCE2 Agile deadline most people have missed
Vouchers for PRINCE2 Agile Version 1 stopped being sold on 30 June 2026. The last day to sit a V1 exam is 31 December 2026. There is no bridging exam — but your V1 certificate is worth more than you think, and only until it isn't.
April 4, 2026Adopting PRINCE2 Agile without the bulldozer
The sharpest criticism of PRINCE2 Agile was written in 2015: full PRINCE2 applied to agile projects is "like plowing a garden with a bulldozer". It is a fair hit against an untailored implementation — and tailoring is the seventh principle for exactly this reason.
March 21, 2026PRINCE2 Agile Version 2 was rebuilt, not refreshed — and the hexagon has quietly gone
Version 2 sits on PRINCE2 7's architecture, which means seven performance aspects instead of six. A six-sided hexagon cannot carry seven variables — and fix-and-flex, the hexagon and the five targets do not appear in the new syllabi at all.
March 7, 2026Big bang or increments: what four audited failures say about your cutover strategy
TSB, Birmingham, Phoenix and Revlon all chose a single cutover. Each has a published investigation. Read together they describe a specific mechanism of failure — and the incremental alternative is not a technology choice but a governance one.
February 21, 2026Define roles, responsibilities and relationships — the word PRINCE2 7 added, and why Robodebt needed it
PRINCE2 7 changed one principle by three words. A Royal Commission that ran to 990 pages and 57 recommendations found the failure was not that roles were undefined, but that the relationships between them carried no obligation to act.
February 7, 2026The Agilometer survived Version 2. It is the most under-used instrument in the method
Six sliders that tell you how much agility your environment can actually absorb. Police Scotland's i6 programme is the rare official audit that names the delivery approach as a causal factor — and shows external assurance rating a dying programme green.
January 24, 2026Stop citing the CHAOS report. Here is what the evidence on project delivery actually says
The most quoted statistic in project management measures estimation accuracy, not success — and a peer-reviewed paper showed an organisation scoring as 'very successful' while overestimating by up to a hundredfold. There is better evidence available, and it is free.
January 10, 2026Project Assurance must not report to the project manager. Phoenix is the proof
Canada's federal pay system went live with over 100 critical functions removed to stay inside budget, and 20 per cent of tested functions failing. The Auditor General's finding was one sentence long: there were no oversight bodies independent of the project management structure.