PRINCE2 Stages

Management Stage and a Technical Stage

What are the Differences?

One of the most puzzling aspects of PRINCE2, is the understanding and intelligent use of management stages, and when running training sessions, it is critically important to explain the difference between management and technical stages.

Consider a typical project for a moment.  In your first high-level planning session as part of your project plan, you and your team will think through the technical or specialist work that needs to be carried out.  This is often done under headings such as specification, design and development, build, test and install.

Each of these should be seen as a technical stage

But before we go any further, I want to introduce the concept of PRINCE2 management stages.  The Project board provides resource authority to the project manager to manage only one stage at a time, and at the end of each stage the project manager must report back to the project board and seek permission to move on to the next stage.

Unlike technical stages, management stages do not overlap, and can therefore only occur one stage at a time.  In order to do this, the project manager creates a high-level project plan splitting the project into sensible management stages. The Project Board will need to agree and authorize the project plan as part of exiting the Initiation stage and proceeding to the first/only delivery stage.

As the end of each management stage is reached, the project manager creates a detailed plan of the next stage, and presents this to the project board along with other information to seek permission to proceed.

A PRINCE2 project has as a minimum, just two management stages; the initiation stage (where the project initiation documentation containing in the project plan will be created), and a second and final delivery stage.  For most projects however, there will be a need for more than one delivery stage.

The following diagram demonstrates that principle:

As you can see, management stages are defined as “partitions of the project with management decision points, and equate to the commitment of resources and authority to spend”

What this means is that the project board releases resources and budget to the project manager on a management stage-by-management stage basis.

A management stage - how many should a project have?

How far ahead in the project is it sensible to plan?  This might be as simple as answering the question, “can we plan the development in detail, until he had agreed on the specification?”

Where are the key decision points going to be?  This will give the first clues as to how many stages, and where in time should they begin and end.

How risky is the project?.  High risk projects will tend to have shorter duration of management stages to allow more control by the project board.  This will result however, in the project manager reporting back to the project board on a more frequent basis.

How confident is the project management team about the project?” Low confidence will tend to cause the need for shorter and more frequent management stages.

Is the project part of a larger initiative such as a programme? If so, it may best to align management stages with key milestone points contained within such a programme.

It may be that management stages are set to align with key deliverables handed over to the customer at various time points within a project.

So how are technical stages aligned with management stages?

Technical stages are in reality a group of activities being carried out by one or more people with the same type of skills.  Such technical stages may traverse more than one management stage.

Technical stages are therefore typified by the use of a particular set of specialist skills.

So check out the following diagram showing a set of technical stages traversing the whole of the project:

So how exactly do we overlay technical stages within the management stages?

And what happens when a particular technical stage needs to traverse more than one management stage?

The answers  are to consider the following points:

The mind-set here is to think “whole products” when splitting a technical stage across more than one management stage.  When asking a member of the team how much percentage complete are we, you will only get a subjective answer, but asking which products have been completed will remove the ambiguity. SO you will get very effective progress control by aligning specialist product completion with stage boundaries.

This will give the Project Board unambiguous progress data upon which to base their decision to proceed or not.

So where technical stages traverse a Management Stage boundary, consider splitting the technical stages (and maybe slightly modifying the Management Stage boundary to coincide with the completion of a whole or partial specialist product:

Finally, let us look at key understanding points regarding management and technical stages:

Okay, this article should clear up any confusion between the definition and application of both management stages and technical stages within a PRINCE2 project!