University of Edinburgh Contributes to UCISA Project and Change Management Best Practice Resource

Mark Ritchie, the Deputy Director and Head of Project Services within Applications Division, also chairs the Project and Change Management Group for the University and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA).

In this capacity Mark has promoted and developed the Major Projects Governance Assessment Toolkit for adoption as a UCISA Best Practice resource.

The updated toolkit has now been published by UCISA and is available for download at: http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/publications/major_project_gov.aspx

This toolkit will also be used for all major projects managed by IS Applications Division 

The toolkit provides:

• guidance on assessing which projects should be classed as Major Projects
• the key governance elements that must be managed for Major Projects
• an assessment tool to help ensure that the required governance actions are established and work effectively throughout the life of the project
• a visualisation tool for project governance which gives a view of the project as it currently stands and the changes since the last review
• case studies on the use of the toolkit at the University

The toolkit has been designed to be complementary to existing project and change management processes. We believe that the toolkit fills an important gap by providing a repeatable assessment process that covers all aspects of governance for major projects - something that Project Sponsors and Project Boards had been asking for at the University for some time! The toolkit is available in PDF and Word versions. You can customise the Word version to meet your local requirements.  We believe that the toolkit provides lots of common sense guidance that will help you make a difference on projects at your own institution. We hope you find it useful and would love to know what you think.

UCISA Projects and Change Management Group http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/pcmg.aspx  You can follow the  UCISA Project and Change Management Group on Twitter at https://twitter.com/UCISA_PCMG

Mark Ritchie IS Applications Divsion