Barts & The London NHS Trust use ProjectProgress PRINCE2™ platform
Thursday 07 April 2005
In-House Project Team Within Barts and The London NHS Trust Uses Project Progress Automated PRINCE2™ Delivery Platform For Building Construction
In-House Projects Team Using Online Collaborative Platform To Manage Multiple Projects, Enforce Compliance and Reduce Risk
Web-based project solutions specialist, Project Progress Ltd, today announced that the Projects Team within the Barts and The London NHS Trust is using its flagship ProjectprogresTM platform for automated PRINCE2™ delivery. The in-house Projects Team is using the online Projectprogress solution for its Capital and Facilities Directorate, which is responsible for managing numerous ongoing capital and building projects.
The in-house Projects Team manage The Capital and Facilities Directorate, which is responsible for managing capital and building projects, ranging from £20,000 up to £2 million. The Directorate manages up to a hundred ongoing projects at any one time. As one of Britain’s top teaching hospitals, Barts and The London NHS Trust is currently undergoing a £1.2 billion investment programme, the biggest hospital redevelopment in Britain. Barts and The London NHS Trust is one of the oldest hospitals in Europe and the biggest PFI in the UK.
"Before we adopted Projectprogress, we had just taken our project management team through PRINCE2™ training," said Scott Simmons, Project Team Leader, Capital and Facilities Directorate for Barts and The London NHS Trust. "However, we knew manual enforcement and adoption of the method would be a labour intensive process, as well as a management challenge. The same words and terms can mean different things to different people, and even just getting everyone to understand common definitions was a major exercise." Although the Project Team had policies in place for managing large buildings as well as smaller projects, Simmons and his colleagues didn’t have a holistic view of what stage each project was at, and with major refurbishments of existing buildings, no two jobs were completely the same. In addition to greater management insight, the Projects Team also wanted a means of enforcing compliance and a full audit trail on its projects. Simmons and his team began trialling ProjectProgress in the summer of 2004 and were at the forefront of PRINCE2™ deployment and the only team in the Trust using a software solution. "Since we’ve been using Projectprogress, we’ve not only seen a vast productivity improvement in our own ability to manage project managers, but we’ve also got complete uniformity across the entire group, with the same consistency of model, process and style, including the project initiation document. Most importantly, we’ve now got full visibility and a full audit trail. The robustness of the Projectprogress audit features has made things much simpler and the whole team is now operating as one," added Simmons. PRINCE, which stands for Projects in Controlled Environments, is a project management method covering the organisation, management and control of projects. PRINCE was first developed by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, now part of the Office of Government Commerce, in 1989 as a UK Government standard for IT project management. Projectprogress delivers the PRINCE2™ method online.
The Projectprogress platform is the only online solution providing complete PRINCE2™ automation. Unlike other project management tools, Projectprogress provides an online collaborative platform to ensure full compliance of PRINCE2™. This includes a real time dashboard for the management of projects with multiple participants from multiple organisations on a permissions-based access with unprecedented levels of security. These elements are essential for ensuring simultaneous, comprehensive management of large complex projects adhered to the highest levels of compliance, auditing and security.
Effectively managing a multiplicity of such projects is simply impossible to do manually. The sheer size, scope, complexity and geographic distribution of project sites makes it unfeasible to ever gain a big picture view, let alone avoid the traditional project management pitfalls. Compounding this problem is the need for greater accountability, corporate governance, audit trails and compliance, especially in the public sector and financial arena. Risk not only needs to be properly managed, but it also needs to be continually assessed as projects move forward. By eliminating lack of access, visibility while managing risk, Projectprogress provides an automated solution that addresses all of these needs.
"Projectprogress delivers the PRINCE2™ method online, providing multiple users with a prescriptive environment for ensuring projects are properly managed and executed," said Adam Smith, CEO of Project Progress Ltd. "The public sector is under continuous pressure to become more accountable, increase stakeholder value and rationalise costs. Organisations, such as the Projects Team within Barts and The London NHS Trust, are taking advantage of online solutions such as ours as a means of imposing greater accountability, access and control."
Woodhead and his team are encouraging other suppliers in the supply chain to adopt the Projectprogess platform, in addition to consultation with other Trusts. PRINCE2™ is already the preferred option for project management within the NHS, including clinical, IT as well as building projects.