PRINCE2 7 Study Guide – Part 7
Controlling a Stage
While creating the next Stage Plan, the Project Manager will update some of the major management products within the Project Initiation Documentation such as the Project Plan and the Business Case.
Since the Stage Plan has been approved by the Project Board, then the project manager must look at progress within the stage itself.
If the project manager determines that the stage is forecast to remain within tolerance bounds, then he or she may take some form of corrective action to minimize any such deviations within tolerance. This may entail giving out new or modified Work Packages to the specialist team.
In addition to this the project manager will need to review the stage status and use the activity of report highlights, which will generate a Highlight Report to be given to the project board so that they understand the status and forecast future of progress within the stage.
The project manager will update the Stage Plan with actual progress and modifying future actions to ensure that the stage plan is forecast to complete within tolerance.
Once this has been authorized, the project manager will give out the work contained within that Stage Plan and the specialist team will create the specialist products via each Work Package. When the last Work Package has been completed (each specialist product has been approved), then this will trigger the project manager to acknowledge that the project end is approaching.
A very important point needs to be made here. If the project, within any management stage, needs to be brought to a premature close, then the closing a project process (CP) is used.
Let us suppose that a given project has three delivery stages after the initiation stage. In the final delivery stage, work packages containing information on the specialist products to be created will be issued and managed as described above.
However, once the final specialist product within the final work package has been approved, then the project manager will trigger the closing a project (CP) processes to shut the project down in a controlled manner.
A final management stage is not used to merely to use the Closing a Project process. In summary, the final stage of a project will use the Controlling a Stage, Managing Product Delivery, and Closing a Project processes.
As each Work Package is completed, then the team manager or the specialist team themselves needs to inform the project manager that the Work Package is indeed complete.
The project manager, as part of the activity evaluate work package status will need to agree that all the products have been completed, met their quality criteria, and have been approved by the appropriate authority.
This may trigger the authorization of a new/revised Work Package description, or that the stage end is approaching, in which case the project manager would use the Managing a Stage Boundary (SB) process to prepare for an end stage assessment.
If at any time during the stage, either issues or risks should arise, then the project manager should use the activity of capture and examine issues and risks to carry out an impact analysis of these on both the stage and project. The appropriate Issue or Risk Register should be updated with such information.
If the project manager determines that some corrective action can be taken via the issue of new or modified Work Packages to resolve the situation, then such actions would need to be taken.
If after impact analysis and the review of this within the status of the stage or the project would show that forecast of tolerances would be exceeded, then the project manager must create an Exception Report and bring this to the attention of the project board.
If a Work Package is forecast to exceed tolerance levels, the Team Manager would raise this as an issue to bring it to the attention of the project manager.
Using the activity escalate issues and risks, the project manager would bring this Exception Report to the attention of the project board.
Put simply, this Exception Report should contain information on the reasons for this forecast of exceeding tolerances, the impact in terms of the appropriate tolerance, and a set of options, which if implemented would return the stage of project within tolerance bounds, and a recommendation of which option should be chosen, and why it is the best option.
PRINCE2® 7 Foundation and Practitioner
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