PRINCE2 – Tailoring Controlling a Stage Part 2
I will repeat this diagram from Part 1 for your easy reference.
Another aspect to consider here is that the product owner, who represents the customer, sits within the specialist delivery team. As such, team members typically plan their work according to the priority order decided by the customer.
As you can see from the diagram below, it is the product backlog that drives the creation of products either within a Work Package or within a particular stage:
Consequently, work is typically not assigned to specific team members in advance.
Within an agile setting, Work Packages are structured flexibly with tolerances, to enable teams to self-organize, and product/Work Package sign-offs maybe done in an informal manner.
Reviews and demonstrations at the end of a sprint or a release will provide transparent and regular feedback to the customer, and in this way, provide a means of validating that the acceptance criteria contained within the product descriptions have been met.
A Work Package may contain several Timeboxes for example in the form of sprints, and although each Timebox will deliver a particular product, that product may not be released into operational use.
When using an agile approach, teams track progress during a short meeting called a daily standup, as shown in the diagram above.
An element of a sprint or Timebox is the daily ‘standup meeting’. This is typically a 15-minute meeting to review the progress of the day, and to agree what will be done tomorrow.
The daily standup provides the delivery team with the opportunity to identify issues and risks. This approach ensures issues and risks are uncovered and can be escalated quickly to ensure that goals are not compromised:
Sprint and release retrospectives also provide an opportunity to improve the underlying process is that the team is using. This can greatly enhance the collection of lessons learned during the stage for timely implementation.
The project manager and team managers may be invited to attend or assess a standup meeting if appropriate – day may even facilitate the standup meeting.
Within a sprint, reporting of progress is typically done via wall charts or information radiators from which information can be pulled at any time by any project stakeholder.
Another aspect to be considered is the requirement for the project manager to gather actual progress and to forecast what remains to be done.
However, forecasting within agile is more generally likely to be in an empirical style based on evidence, with progress usually shown as a Burn Chart rather than a Gantt chart. An example is shown below:
The project manager needs to ‘think agile’, and focus on flexing the scope and the quality criteria of the defined products, ensure that those variables stage within the agreed tolerances, so that each sprint remains time constrained.
The project manager should see this as an advantage, as it will increase the probability of the stage completed on time.
Controlling a Stage from a supplier perspective
For an external supplier, the customer’s Work Package may take the form of a legally binding contract. However, the supplier may decompose the contract and Work Packages into smaller Work Packages to manage their part of the work.
It is important that the project manager ensures they have sufficient information from the supplier to control the work, and this may require specific obligations on the supplier to be included within the contract.
Controlling a Stage of a project within a programme or portfolio
One aspect that needs to be considered up front here, is how the projects logs and registers should be maintained, and help escalation to programme or portfolio level is to be done in practical terms.
It may be, that there is a single risk register system and administered by the program or portfolio, and including both the program/portfolio risks and the risks for each project.
Conversely, it may be that each project should or could maintain its own risk register.
Such strategies should be included within the projects risk management approach (forming part of the PID). This information should define how programme/portfolio level risks are identified and captured by the project, and are escalated to the programme/portfolio risk register.
In a similar way, the program/portfolio risk management approach should define mechanisms for project risks that are identified and captured at the programme/portfolio level, and include how these are to be delegated to the project risk register.
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