Blog

The Private Sector IR35 countdown clock is ticking louder and louder. Before you can say "non-compliant off-payroll Project Manager", it will be time for private firms to follow the Public Sector pioneers into this new world. It's come around quick, hasn't it? One of my accountant friends drily comm...

Guest blog by Nicol Cutts – Stoneseed Head of Projects        May 2019 sees the fifth, annual 'Women in Tech Festival' in Silicon Valley. Aptly, my invitation to attend dropped into my inbox at the same time as a reply to a question that I'd asked a CIO friend whose organisation has consistently hig...

When discussing Stoneseed's Project Management as a Service (PMaaS) solutions with clients I am always intrigued by the way they manage IT projects. In almost every case, the client will walk us through some form of lifecycle, typically composing four stages that can be loosely labelled along the fo...

At a wedding recently, the nephew of the bride was a bit of a comedian. He was about nine years old, with a cheeky smile and we genuinely laughed when he bounded up and delivered this joke! "Knock, knock!" "Who’s there?" we replied. "Hatch" "Hatch who?" "Bless you!" he said drily, handing us a handk...

I started to write this on the day that the world's media declared that the "internet turned 30". OK, without getting nerdy, although the terms are often used interchangeably, March 12, was actually the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. But hey, semantics – right?! Whatever you want to call it...

In a recent 'flyover' of IT Project Methodologies, I promised that I would return to each individually and assess their advantages and disadvantages. In this, the first in a series of posts, let's take a look at Waterfall.  Waterfall. What Is It, When Should You Use It? 1970 was quite a year for fir...

My friend tells the story of a 4x4 SSV he used to own. Famous marque, I won't name them, but not a cheap car AT ALL! The vehicle developed a fault, the reverse light wasn't working and there was a considerable delay between changing gear and the dashboard display registering the gear you were in. He...

The evolution of the IT Business Analyst role is increasingly seeing the job description stretch beyond the "IT" further into the "Business" territory. This means greater career prospects for analysts but also real challenges for businesses who do not have a character like this on their team. It's a...

I've noticed a bit of a trend. Of the IT Projects that I've seen fall into ‘special measures’ of late, they've all had something in common - a gap between stakeholder expectation and reality. It's actually (paradoxically) both easy and hard to nail this. Some project teams struggle but, like with mo...

Oh my!! Have you seen the video of 7-year-old runner Rudolph 'Blaze' Ingram who sprinted 100 metres in just 13.48 seconds? It's fascinating to watch this young Florida athlete speed out of the blocks; and after clocking up thousands and thousands of Instagram views, as I write this, he has made the ...

For a Project Management Office (PMO) to deliver peak value it needs to be designed to support the unique needs of its parent organisation and also to operate at a level that the organisation can easily understand and work with. Even as I wrote the sentence above it felt such an obvious thing to say...

Working with IT project teams for many years now, I've noticed an easily fixed issue that crops up in struggling projects year after year. I'm sure that I've written about it before, probably more than once and as it just happened again, I thought it worth a fresh reminder. IT Projects are being cho...

Business strategic alignment. This is a drum that I've been banging for a long time. If the outcomes of your IT projects do not translate into benefits for your business - what's the point? Sounds so obvious but time after time project management teams end up not working in cohesion with their paren...

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Life is all about choices. Some are more important than others and choosing the right Project Management methodology, for instance, is crucial. I am often asked what methodology is best and my answer is always - it depends. Each project is different and therefore the...

Guest blog by Andrew Gallagher, Principal Project Manager, Stoneseed Working on projects for a long time, longer than I care to remember, the same topic just keeps rearing its head. Be it in the public or private sector working on IT or Business Transformation the same question comes up time and tim...