PRINCE2 AGILE Environments
Welcome to your Wizard’s guide to blending PRINCE2 and Agile Project Methodologies. Using both PRINCE2 and AGILE is easier than you might think
AGILE ENVIRONMENTS
Agile is another common environment that PRINCE2 works effectively within. Lets look at PRINCE2 AGILE and how they overlap and blend nicely together. The Agile Manifesto outlines the four principles of the agile approach:
- Individuals and interactions are valued more than processes and tools
- Working products are valued more than comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration is valued more than contract negotiation
- Responding to change is valued more than following a plan
PRINCE2 and Agile environments
Over the last decade, agile approaches have started to be used successfully in all sorts of industries.
Agile approaches deliver the products over a series of iterations rather than all at the end of the project, and such iterations are referred to as sprints. Sprints are quite short, anything from 1 to 4 weeks in duration. Although the client will not get everything they want in the earlier releases, at least they do not have to wait too long until they get some useful products. Releasing in short bursts avoids the situation where, if a deadline is a long way off, the natural human tendency is to prevaricate and work more slowly. In an agile world, the deadline for release is always only a few weeks away, which motivates the team to get down to their work. There is always the risk that what the teams are creating is not really what the client wants, and clients can do their best to put across their requirements, and suppliers do their best to understand them, but often the only time when the client can really see if the supplier understands them, is when there are handed the final product. Agile approaches discover misconceptions about requirements much quicker and so save more time and money than if everything is delivered at the project end. Agile calls this failing fast since it something better to know you’re doing the wrong thing as quickly as possible. The client can give feedback to teams when they start using products from earlier releases, which can help teams create better products in later releases.
PRINCE2 is entirely compatible with this iterative way of delivering.
One of the PRINCE2 principles is managing a project by stages, and the project team could release products at the end of each stage if required. The agile focus on delivering regularly is aligned to the PRINCE2 principle of focus on products.
Another agile concept is timeboxing. This is where a sprint of work is fixed to a certain amount of time and if the delivery team falls behind in their work, rather than slip the deadline, they must deliver less.
For timeboxing to work, the team must be given some flexibility on the scope of work that they need to deliver.
This can be done within PRINCE2 by using scope tolerances and the principle of managing by exception to implement this agile idea.
Another agile term is backlog.
The backlog is a list of prioritised requirements that the customer wants to see in the finished product, however agile approaches often use the term user stories because they describe a journey that the user would take with the product.
The items in a backlog should be ordered by the value that they will provide to the customer, and this helps agile change to prioritize which user stories to work on the early releases and which to eliminate if they are running out of time within the sprint.
This is aligned with the PRINCE2 principles of focus on products and continued business justification.
Blending PRINCE2 Agile Environments
PRINCE2 has roles that manage and control teams, whereas agile has team’s that organize themselves – there is no team manager. However, the PRINCE2 Agile approach is to managing people can work together very effectively. And your frameworks such as scrum recommend a servant leadership approach to delivery teams, since terms like ‘manager’ or ‘management’ imply an autocratic approach to leading teams and a lack of trust and team members.
Servant-leader support their teams by using facilitating and collaborative stars have leadership.
Servant-leaders provide a range of management services such as:
- Removing impediments for the team
- Helping the team run progress meetings
- Providing tools and techniques to enable teams to work better
The key to blending an agile environments with PRINCE2, is getting the balance right between the need to control and manage the project (which increases the likelihood of project success), and allowing the delivery teams to be self-organizing, collectively responsible for their work, empowered, and thereby increasing motivation and engagement of the team.
The key link between these two concepts is the link between the project manager and the teams and getting this link right is vital in ensuring that the PRINCE2 and agile environments work well together.
The Project Manager and the Agile Team
The first consideration when blending with agile, is to consider whether you need someone called the team manager to liaise with the project manager.
For a start, using the word ‘manager’ with agile is not a good idea!
What is important however, is that the responsibilities of the PRINCE2 team manager are covered.
Team manager responsibilities include:
- Planning Monitoring Controlling and managing progress Liaising with the project manager
- Liaising with other stakeholders Managing issues and risks
- Handover of the products
In a highly agile environments with effective teams, the project manager might review the ‘team manager’ responsibilities with the agile team and make sure they agreed to cover them collectively. This infers that the project manager may need to communicate with more than one person.
Maybe in a scrum environment, the project manager may just liaise with the scrum master.
Agile teams require a high degree of autonomy to work effectively and therefore work best when they don’t have to constantly referred upwards for a decision that are instead left until a work without interruptions.
The PRINCE2 principle of management by exception helps to create autonomous teams.
Using this principle, the project manager delegates work packages describing the targets for cost, time, and scope for the work.
Some of these targets may have tolerance which allows the delivery seem to have more autonomy because they don’t have to refer after the project manager or power decision on whether or not to build some of these sprints products if they are running out of time.
Another agile approach is that the teams need to be small, between 3 to 9 people. If the teams are bigger, the project manager might consider breaking up the work to create two or more smaller teams.
It is important that such things should have people with the right range of skills to complete the work, although such individuals may come from different functions within the organization.
The Product Owner and PRINCE2
Many agile approaches represent the user and customer view in a different way to PRINCE2.
Scrum defines the role of the product owner.
There is only one product owner individual and they are accountable for collating the list, requirements and features that are needed by the users and customers. Somewhat similar to the PRINCE2 senior user. But not quite.
Having one individual represent the customer and business news, works fine when the project is focused on one product and doing regular upgrades on that product. But this does not work well for larger more complex projects where there is often a wide range of views and perspectives about how the product will be used.
Another consideration is that some customers for a strategic view on requirements, whereas other customers have a more detailed, specialist view on the products requirements.
One way of resolving this, is if the senior user on the project board could be seen as a ‘Super Product Owner’. This role would direct the work of individual product owners operating within each delivery team.
Subject-matter Experts
Each delivery team might have several customer subject matter experts, acting for all reviews from a specific customer or user of the products.
These customer subject matter experts are similar to that product owners and would also sits on the project board as senior users. They can also be some specialists, often called business analysts all requirements of engineers, who are trained in understanding:
- Business requirements
- Mapping out business processes
- Translating these processes into product designs
Such individuals might be team members within a requirements-gathering team, or spread out across the number of other teams.
All these approaches can be blended together to create a workable representation of the customer business issue within a PRINCE2 and agile environment.
