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Project management has to be a core competency for an organisation like the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and, indeed, for all our organisations. And I am not just talking about IT projects, I am talking about operational projects, particularly large projects like the population census which we are doing later this year. Now I said IT projects, but that is probably a bad term to use. What we really should be talking about is business projects with IT as an enabler.
I will first go through some of the reasons for needing a project management framework, that is, why the ABS decided to introduce one. I will then walk through the ABS project management framework before talking about some of our key learnings, both successes and failures. Finally I will describe a case study of the application of the project management framework, our Business Statistics Innovation Program.
My key message is the need for an agreed project management framework. This is not only to ensure that you have effective project management, but that it is done in a consistent and effective way. You can then support your project management framework with training programs, guidelines and so forth. If everyone is doing it their own way it becomes much more difficult. I will be talking about the ABS project framework, but I am not trying to sell that to you, what I am trying to sell to you is that it is important to have some form of project framework. And there is off-the-shelf software available. Microsoft Project is one example but there are many others that you might be able to fairly easily adapt for your own particular circumstances.