Congratulations to the winners of the 2018 National Project Awards, which were announced on Thursday, 29 November. The National Project Awards are organised by the Ireland Chapter of PMI voluntary committee. This year, our CEO, Pat Lucey had the honour of delivering the welcome address to attendees as President of the Ireland Chapter of PMI. Pat will continue his two-year presidency next year, 2019.

The winners are as follows:

• Project Professional of the Year 2018 (sponsored by PwC) — Declan Rundle, AIB
• PMO of the Year 2018 (sponsored by Datalex)— ESB IT Services
• Public Sector Project of the Year 2018 (sponsored by IPA) — Revenue Commissioners, Customer Engagement Strategy
• Private Sector Project of the Year 2018 (sponsored by Aspira) — AIB, GDPR Programme
• Social Good – Community 2018 (sponsored by the Ireland Chapter of PMI) — Tour de Munster, Charity Cycle
• Social Good – Corporate 2018 (sponsored by AIB) — Cork Airport, Charity of the Year programme
• Distinguished Contribution to Project Management 2018 (sponsored by CORA Systems) — Ed Naughton, Institute of Project Management

Speaking about the winners, Pat Lucey said: “The National Project Awards celebrate the very best of project management, at a time when demand for project managers has never been higher, due to a turbulent global economy exacerbated in Ireland by Brexit.

“By 2027, the Project Management Institute expects that employers around the world will need nearly 88 million project managers. The quality and range of this year’s entries showcase why project management is so vital to delivering successful projects across all sectors in Irish commercial life.”

Mr Lucey added: “We would like to thank our judging panel who diligently reviewed each entry and selected those who, in their view, exemplify project management excellence in Ireland. A special thank you also to our valued sponsors for their continued support.”

The National Project Awards recognise and honour individuals, project teams and organisations that have excelled within the project management discipline. The black-tie event took place at Spencer Dock, Dublin 1 and was compered by Newstalk Business Editor Vincent Wall.

The National Project Awards 2018 is proudly supported by principal sponsor PwC, along with AIB, Aspira, CORA Systems, Datalex, Institute of Public Administration (IPA) and the Ireland Chapter of PMI.

The Ireland Chapter of Project Management Institute (PMI) is due to announce the winners of the 2018 National Project Awards, sponsored by PwC, tomorrow, Thursday, 29 November.

The National Project Awards recognise and honour individuals, project teams and organisations that have excelled within the project management discipline. The black-tie event will take place at Spencer Dock, Dublin 1.

CEO of Aspira, Pat Lucey has had the honour of being elected the President of the Ireland Chapter of PMI for 2018. Pat has worked extensively throughout the year with his committee to further promote the work of Irish project managers and drive excellence within the discipline both in Ireland and globally. The National Project Awards celebrate the very best of project management and aim to promote best practices in project management.

Aspira are also delighted to sponsor the Ireland Chapter of PMI Awards, Private Sector of the Year category.

We would like to wish finalists across all categories the best of luck on the evening.

Technology is moving at a fast pace, disrupting organisations and the ways in which have have worked for decades. When paired with other organisational challenges that encountered in daily working life, it is increasingly more difficult to drive your organisation to change to meet these needs and challenges as they arise. One way in which we can prepare for change and equip our team s with the skills they need to thrive and adapt are with agile training.

An Agile team can evolve and react more rapidly, meaning that challenges are more easily overcome and projects are delivered more successfully on an ongoing basis. Head of Training Norma Lynch shares her top three tips to create agile working teams:

1. Focus on results

Placing emphasis on the outcome and not the process drives your team to work smarter, rather than adhering to processes that may not work for the project for the sake of procedure. It also empowers your team to make their own decisions and work more efficiently to achieve their objectives.

2. Feedback

Collecting and curating feedback throughout a project ensures that you have a constant flow of communication. This helps your team to identify issues at an early stage, enabling your teams to react and change paths if required, reducing time spent and increasing team optimisation.

3. Training

If your team are lacking the basic knowledge they need to work in an agile environment, this will cause problems for projects. It’s absolutely vital that team members have knowledge of the framework and that training is provided on an ongoing basis to allow teams to develop their various skillsets within that, particularly team leads and those in senior and management roles.

At Aspira, we work to create bespoke training packages to meet all of your training requirements. From once-off group training to ongoing coaching options, we cover a variety of topics, from general project management introduction to advanced examination preparation courses. We work with manufacturers, pharmaceutical, telecoms, transport, services, and technology companies to deliver PM, business analysis, Scrum Master, Lean Six Sigma training and more.

Contact Norma to see how we can meet your training requirements for 2019 here: norma.lynch@aspira.ie

We provide training both in Ireland and onsite internationally if required.

In recent months, the talent pool in Ireland has become competitive. Many multinational companies have set up their European headquarters in Ireland. We regularly speak to client companies about the benefits of hiring for specific skills gaps during specific projects, on a long-term, or short-term basis, through a trusted partner like Aspira.

We put together project delivery teams with a blended mix of our expert permanent staff and our experienced associate consultants. Many of our associate consultants are active in the contract market, and have a long-term association with us.
The companies we work with all have similar challenges:
• It is very difficult to find permanent people for niche IT Role.
• Experienced and qualified Project Managers and Business Analysts are hard to find.
• The talent pool in Ireland is extremely competitive, making it more difficult to source staff.
Despite these issues, we find that companies are reluctant to use day rate consultants, considered to be ‘too expensive’, ‘not a long-term solution’, ‘don’t understand the company culture’ and so on. However, sometimes you face a business project that needs urgent delivery and this is where an experienced Aspira consultant might just be the answer.

The benefits of hiring a daily-rate Aspira consultant include:
1. You only pay them for days worked.
2. If hired through Aspira, all the payroll costs are handled which is less work for the finance department.
3. No additional hidden costs because a daily rate is all inclusive.
4. Costly employee benefits such as training or bonuses are not charged to the client company
5. Less of a notice period in case projects are cancelled.
6. If you hire an Aspira team member, you can expect results and delivery in a shorter time. They are experienced at quickly evaluating client challenges and ensuring minimum delays through long learning curves.

For more information on resourcing and how it can benefit your organisation, contact our resourcing team at info@www.aspira.ie or visit the website www.aspira.ie

Author: Russell Moore, HR & Resourcing Manager, Aspira

The importance of brilliant business analysis cannot be underestimated. Sloppy business requirements leads to bursting budgets and stagnant schedules as projects trip over clumsy requirements. Business analysis, when perfectly executed, results in a solid signed-off set of agreed business requirements, with no ambiguity and complete business buy-in.

A large majority of business owners aren’t aware of the full extent of what they want or need prior to being led through the Requirements Gathering phase. If the owner of the project doesn’t know what they want, how can the project deliver it? The answer lies in business analysis.

That is why business analysts are the lynchpin of every successful project. Our Business Analysis training will ensure your team will:

1. Get the requirements of your project right and learn techniques for solution assessment and validation. This means saving money on expensive changes further down the development road and keeping the schedule streamlined and on track. Investing in Business Analysis will bring demonstrable benefits to your organisation regardless of the industry.

2. Learn practical techniques to power up your communication skills. Business Analysts are essential intermediaries between the business and the technology departments of an organisation, thus they must be able to elicit requirements eloquently and assess solutions astutely.

3. Understand Business Analysis terminology, concepts and methodologies including the seven business knowledge areas. It will also teach you what you need to know in order to pass the Certified Business Analysis Professional™ (CBAP} exam including test-taking strategies.

Aspira’s Business Analysis training course will demonstrate to you not just how to be a great business analyst, but what it really takes to be an awesome one. Aspira is an approved education provider by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®).

Email training@www.aspira.ie to book the last few remaining places of our CBAP course on 11th, 12th, 18th & 19th September 2018.

There comes a point within an organisation where they require a centralised location for managing their data and content. SharePoint is the ideal solution for this. Used by 78% of Fortune 500 companies, SharePoint is a leading platform for document collaboration and more. Here are three ways SharePoint can benefit your organisation:

1. Easier Collaboration

Sharing files through email attachments while changes are being made is a common practice in many businesses. However, this can be difficult to keep track of and result in multiple different versions of a document. It also adds to the load on your mail server. With SharePoint, a link to the document can be provided to employees so they can view and make changes, ensuring that everyone has access to the latest version and no changes are missed. Using permissions within SharePoint also means that only the desired employees have access to the document.

2. Consolidated Data

Over time an organisation starts storing important data in random locations. Important data is captured on an excel and saved on an employee’s computer. Situations like this make it difficult to keep track of data. Using SharePoint features like versioning and metadata to store data will prevent any confusion around your data.

3. Customised Solutions

SharePoint has near limitless configuration options and is flexible enough to make it useful to an organisation in many ways. After migrating you can leverage SharePoint to improve many of your business processes using out of the box solutions, as well as being able to build customised solutions.
Quickly finding, reviewing, approving, sharing and storing data is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SharePoint. Consider Aspira SharePoint Training for your team to increase efficiency and productivity in the workplace. Contact training@www.aspira.ie for further information.

You have always worked in operations. You have always been effective. You have always had total control. But suddenly, you are parachuted into a brand new role and given a brand new shiny project with a looming deadline. You feel slightly uneasy, as the clock has started ticking on your project and you’re not sure where to begin.

You don’t know what exactly you have to do, you don’t know how possible it is to do it and you don’t know who the key players are. So you begin to ask a few questions. However, you are left none the wiser as everyone seems to want something different and no one has any previous experience of this type of project, so they are not sure what is involved.

Puzzled you call your friend, who has delivered many successful projects and you tell him your predicament. He gives you three pieces of advice. Don’t promise the sun, moon and stars. Beware of men in raincoats looking for ‘just one more thing’. Finally, watch out for the canary in the coalmine! Utterly confused, you ask ‘is this project management – men in white coats, flying to the moon?’ So your friend begins to explain:

• Don’t promise the sun, moon and stars

You need to manage expectations. To do this you need to identify and prioritise all your stakeholders now, communicate and engage with them often and ask what success looks like for them.

• Beware of men in raincoats looking for ‘just one more thing’

You need to avoid scope creep. You need to ensure that the work of the project is clearly defined as well as the work that is not included. You need to keep your project from creeping into chaos by managing any requests for ‘just one more thing’ to the original agreed work with an impact assessment.

• Watch out for the canary in the coalmine

You need to have triggers to alert you of any impending show stoppers that could potentially harm or derail your project.

Now you are totally confused. You may have been a great operations manager, but Project Management is a new world, with a new language and a different approach. And so, you sit down to write an email to training@www.aspira.ie  ‘Please help me to become a great Project Manager’.  Suddenly you are feeling better.

Author: Norma Lynch, Training Manager, Aspira https://www.linkedin.com/in/norma-lynch-b3922413/

I decided to try to write an explanation for BlockChain – the technology behind Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. Not to describe how the technology works (which involves decentralized networks, consensus protocols, cryptography and game theory), but instead try to explain what it effectively does.  So far, so good.

I then spent all weekend trying to come up with a good analogy for what BlockChain does. So far, not so good!  It is really hard to find an accurate analogy for this technology.  I find myself accidentally describing Bitcoin, and then have to step back from it.

Part of the problem is that for most of us, trying to visualise BlockChain is something similar to cavemen trying to understand paper money. Just imagine how hard it was for people who only knew the barter system.

Back then, if I wanted to buy a cow, I’d need to exchange it for six sheep. And suddenly you are telling me that I should hand over my six sheep for these pieces of dried leaves – and you’re promising me that the guy who owns the cow will accept these pieces of paper and hand over his cow to me?  How do I know I can trust you?

Now let’s come back to the present day. We are all accustomed to using paper money to buy and sell goods and services – without really thinking about how the whole system actually works, but we struggle to imagine how BlockChain works.  Here goes:

Imagine for a moment there is a world computer that is openly accessible to anybody who has an internet connection, so everyone can create an account for free and use it as much as they like. Nobody owns this computer – no government or company or individual.  It cannot be tampered with by anyone and it keeps a perfect (immutable) audit of every transaction or keystroke or piece of data that goes into it.  It remembers each misspelling your make and backspace you use – it never forgets anything (and no, it does not remind me of my spouse!)

This what BlockChain gives you – a technology platform available to all but not owned by any. And if you want to invent your own micro-currency such as Bitcoin, BlockChain gives you the technology platform to create that currency.   It is owned by nobody and will remember everything – therefore it can be trusted.  And trust is the one thing that must exist if you are to have a working currency.

There is huge potential for new uses of BlockChain, such as creation of digital contracts – contracts that are guaranteed to be executed once the payment terms are hit – no more ‘the cheque is in the post’, no more need for escrow services, no more need for third parties getting involved.

If you want to invent something new, that you want to make open to every person on the planet, and you want to ensure that the true ownership of this new thing you create will always reside with its rightful owner – you should use BlockChain technology. The future potential is huge and is largely untapped – the reality is that this technology will produce completely novel unforeseen products.

Will there be unforeseen problems? Definitely!  Recent GDPR legislation includes the ‘right to be forgotten’.  How does that right tally with a technology that can never forget anything, ever?  It’s the irresistible force of GDPR vs the immovable object of BlockChain

And that was the best analogy I could come up with!

Please contact www.aspira.ie or 021-2352550 if you have any queries.