Ben Goldacre is the author of "bad science", a treatise on alternative medicine, pseudoscience and our (generally) credulous attitude to unsubstantiated scientific claims. He also blogs extensively on the same subjects over at BadScience.net. One of Goldacre's persistent themes is the current standard (should that be "substandard"?) of scientific journalism and its contribution to the public "misunderstanding of science". His central complaint is that most science journalists are guilty of Churnalism (generating copy by uncritically incorporating press releases into news stories (attributed to Nick Davies)) and, not unreasonably, points out that this is neither informative nor enlightened reporting, it is simply "promotional activity masquerading as news" (Goldacre 2008 p.211).

By now, I expect you're wondering why any of this is relevant to a project management blog: well, it appears that sloppy journalism and uncritical reproduction of press releases is not confined to matters of science!

The July (2009) edition of Project Magazine (vol. 21 Issue 9) carries the following headline in its News section (p.6):


The "best practice model" in question is PRINCE2 and the poll is an amalgam of two surveys conducted by the Aston Business School's (ABS) Centre for Project Management Practice (CPMP) for the "PRINCE2 or not to PRINCE2" debate (June 2009). The article claims:

"[M]ore than almost [sic] one third of those attending (the to PRINCE2 or not to PRINCE2 debate) believed that it (PRINCE2) had little effect or was actually harmful to the projects undertaken"

The ABS's own website goes a little further, suggesting:

"Organisations across the private and public sectors were stunned to realise that the leading Project Management model for global business used by hundreds of thousands of companies world-wide may not be as valuable or as cost effective as previously thought."

We can be confident that the Project article is Churnalism because the grammatical howler ("more than almost one third") is replicated on the ABS website and is obviously a cut and paste error by Project's editorial staff!

Of course, none of this would matter if we could substantiate the claims in the headline, but the truth is perhaps a little more mundane (and less stunning) than we are led to believe. The poll presented respondents with four questions:

1. PRINCE2 has been/would be invaluable in making project more effective in my organisation
2. PRINCE2 has been/would have some role in improving project performance in my organisation
3. PRINCE2 has been/would have very little effect on improving projects in my organisation
4. PRINCE2 has been/would be harmful to projects in my organisation

The first poll (slide 10) appears to be a pre-debate ballot and suggests that something over 70% of respondents chose either option 1 or option 2. One might be forgiven for wondering how exactly this poll calls into question the effectiveness of PRINCE2: after all, nearly three in four of the respondents believe that PRINCE2 would improve their project performance and, if we include respondents who selected option 3 (a neutral position, although I suspect that this is merely poor phrasing), the number of respondents who believe that PRINCE2 does no harm to an organisation rises to over 90%!

The post-debate poll (slide 14) suggests that over 65% of respondents still believed that PRINCE2 would help organisational project management and over 80% that PRINCE2 is at worse neutral.

I don't have access to the raw data and acknowledge that I have based my interpretation on information available from the ABS website. Nonetheless, this data does little to support the conclusion that PRINCE2 is not "as valuable or as cost effective as previously thought" and the rather emotive language of the headline is at best unhelpful or even potentially misleading.

PRINCE2 is a project management method: its efficacy depends on its implementation and its deployment context. If you follow any method without first understanding the underlying principles, you're asking for trouble! Respectfully, I suggest that the Aston Business School's claim that PRINCE2 is an ineffective method is both premature and unsupportable and that Project Magazine is guilty of sloppy, inaccurate reportage.

Labels: PRINCE2