Design and appoint the project management team
Project Management Team in PRINCE2
As with all roles within PRINCE2, choices need to be made about who the correct and most appropriate individuals to fill each of those roles. Some roles, like the executive and project manager will only have one person within it. But other roles such as the senior user may have several people needed to fill it.
PRINCE2 describes responsibilities (roles), and this is not to be confused with ‘jobs’. Within the project management team there are four roles, and these can be shared by an individual or a several individuals may fill a role – put simply:
- a role can be filled by more than one person.
- one person can have more than one role.
Whenever considering who would be the best choice, a person’s skills, experience, authority, commitment, and availability, are some of the criteria that need to be considered when creating the PRINCE2 project management team.
PRINCE2 Project Management Team defined.
The project management team needs to reflect the interests of all parties and stakeholders who will be involved within the project.
As such, the PRINCE2 project management team must act as a team in support of each other, and the PRINCE2 project management team concept is a powerful one as it binds together every manager to ensure they are all committed and responsible for project success.
The project board forms part of the PRINCE2 project management team. The project board represents senior managers who own the project.
There are four levels of authority within a PRINCE2 organizational structure, and it is the final three below that form part of the PRINCE2 project management team:
- Corporate or Programme Management. The project board report into these.
- Project Board. Responsible for project direction
- Project Manager. Performs day-to-day management responsibility.
- Team Manager. Delivering the specialist products by managing the specialist team.
This will include business interests, user interests and supplier interests. Like any well run project, each individual needs to understand and agree with the PRINCE2 project management team, who is accountable to for what, who is responsible for what, and what the reporting and communication lines are.
Within a PRINCE2 project management team, the business and user interests are from the customers side, and the supplier from the supply side.
The first step is to examine the Lessons Log for any lessons that may be applied from previous similar PRINCE2 projects to designing and appointing a project management team. The next step is to prepare the team structure, and then to create role descriptions for the remaining project board roles within the PRINCE2 project management team.
Within the PRINCE2 project management team, remember that the term role has nothing to do with an individual’s status.
An important responsibility of the PRINCE2 project board is project assurance. This is part of the PRINCE2 project management team, and consists of three roles, business assurance, user assurance, and supplier assurance. What must be decided at this point in time is whether the senior user role will carry out their own user assurance or whether they will delegate it. The same applies for the executive and supplier roles.
From the project manager’s perspective, he/she will want to decide whether the optional Team Manager role is needed and if so, create their role descriptions. Another consideration for the project manager to make is whether they will provide their own project support or whether a separate individuals will be required. If project support is to be delegated then a role description for project support will be required.
The reporting and communication lines within all role descriptions need to be confirmed, and remaining individuals within the project management team can now be appointed.
It is important to ensure that suitable candidates for each of these roles are available for the time and effort estimates for each role.
Identifying individual candidates for each of the roles can now be done, although for larger and more complex project management teams, it may be appropriate to undertake stakeholder analysis to more accurately select appropriate candidates for each role.
Some form of training may be required if suitable experienced individuals are not currently available, in which case it needs to be considered how and when such training will be given and funded.
Depending on the nature of the project, it may not be possible to identify all candidates for the roles at this time, in which case it may not be possible to appoint them until later.
Consideration should be given as to whether a temporary role could be appointed at this time to represent their interests. An example might be appointing the organisation’s purchasing manager as the senior supplier roles, until such time as contracts are placed with third parties.
During the starting up a project process, the daily log is used to capture and manage any known issues and risks.
For more information on PRINCE2 – GO HERE
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