Dominic Tinley

I am an interactive media specialist with 15 years' experience leading projects that push the boundaries of new technology within different organisations. I get involved at the start of new projects, scoping them and developing prototypes. This is a personal blog about things I'm interested in. If you want to chat please contact me via Twitter.

My PRINCE2 Practitioner status expires in six months and I need to decide whether or not to sit the re-registration exam.

PRINCE2 (an acronym for PRojects IN Controlled Environments) has been the de facto project management methodology in the Civil Service for over ten years, but although I’ve worked on large projects for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the UK Parliament I’ve never seen anyone apply it in full.

I took my PRINCE2 exam in 2005 when I was a Development Producer for Culture Online, a DCMS programme to fund innovative projects that combined arts, culture and technology. It had been the first serious studying I’d done since university and I remember it being pretty hard work.

You can understand why the Civil Service likes PRINCE2. There are 45 separate processes each of which warrants several pages of description in the manual but only one of which actually involves producing anything. I wonder if the ratio of Civil Service efficiency is in fact somewhere around 1:45?

At Parliament the project management processes were perhaps the most bureaucratic I’ve ever encountered with massive Project Boards made up of senior managers who could rarely explain why they were there. One told me she’d met the person who wrote PRINCE2 as if this gave her some kind of papal superiority. Others would sit their saying nothing for literally hours on end.

But I know PRINCE2 isn’t all bad. At the DCMS we cherry-picked the best bits for our project commissioning process and it worked pretty well. We had small Project Board meetings with clearly defined roles based loosely on executive-user-supplier triumvirate. We started each project with a comprehensive business case that we’d refer to throughout. And we had the best approach I’ve ever seen to risk management.

Since I qualified I’ve worked on all kinds of complex projects and in those five years no employer or client has ever asked if I’m PRINCE2 certified. But I worry that if I let the knowledge slip completely it will be much harder to get up to speed again should I find myself in a senior project manager or project director role again.

So I need to decide and I need to decide soon, a little PRINCE2 now or an uncertain amount of PRINCE2 later?

A building on Hampstead Road just north of Warren Street Station advertises office space available, 104,518 square feet or 9,709 square metres of it to be precise. I was struck by the icons used in the window which at first glance tell you a lot about the amenities as you pass by.

Starting from right to left a P tells me the office has parking, a C crossed out tells me it’s outside the London congestion charge zone, a glass tells me there are bars nearby, and the London Transport and Eurostar symbols tell me it’s within easy reach of public transport. I wasn’t sure about the leaf.

A second window with a similar advert tells me the office has ‘all the right signs’ and directs me to the building’s website at www.stephenson-house.com. This is fairly predictable estate agent nonsense where better locations are no more than a few minutes walk away…

Only 3 minutes to fashionable Charlotte Street and Fitzrovia, providing a wide selection of acclaimed trendy bars and restaurants to entertain clients or relax with friends and colleagues out of hours.

…but nevertheless the icons work well and did their job. Should I be looking for 104,518 square feet of office space they would have already had me take the first step.

I’ve recently finished reading the seminal art history and visual culture book Ways of Seeing by John Berger. For five years it’s sat on a shelf with a bookmark at page nine and although I’ve picked it up many times I’ve always failed to read any further. Then a couple of weeks ago something clicked and I read the book from cover to cover. I’m glad it did because had I not I would have missed this:

We are now so accustomed to being addressed by [publicity] images that we scarcely notice their total impact.

and this:

Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society.

and this:

The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses.

When I picked up the book this last time round I knew what the problem had been all along: until recently I don’t think I’d ever heard John Berger speak and until I imagined him reading the text it didn’t come alive. For one thing the fact the book is typeset in a heavy weight of the Univers font means it’s not the easiest to read but it seems to fit with John Berger’s narrative voice.

The book is based on the four-part BBC series of the same name originally broadcast in 1972 and shown again last year on BBC Four (you’ll find most of it on YouTube). A friend recommend I watch it when I was researching colour and having done so I gave the book another go. I read it so quickly it got me thinking about other books I’ve taken time to get into and I realise it’s a recurring theme.

I found the style of The God Delusion mildly irritating until I remembered that’s just how Richard Dawkins comes across in person, but in real life he has humour and humility that you need to take back to the book. And I remember reading The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg which is a fascinating biography of our language which makes far more sense if you read it like it’s an episode of In Our Time.

The amusing thing for me is that having made the link between how I read and how narrators talk there’s a subtle clue to all this in the very first words of Ways of Seeing which appear, unusually, on the front cover. Had I thought about them more closely I might just have finished it sooner:

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.