The PRINCE2 Managing Product Delivery Process – Part 2
Tailoring considerations
Sometimes a project uses external suppliers that do not use PRINCE2.
The process of managing product delivery provides a statement of the required working relationship between the team manager and the project’s PRINCE2 method by the project manager.
The work package may be part of a contractual agreement; therefore, the formality of a team plan could vary from simply appending a schedule to the work package description to creating a fully formed plan that is presented in a style similar to a stage plan.
When to produce a PRINCE2 team plan
In PRINCE2, team plans are optional. The default place to create a team plan, if one is needed, is in the first activity of the process, which is “accept a work package”.
It is possible that team plans will be created at the same time as the stage plan in the process managing a stage boundary, and the stage plan built up from the team plans, but that more unusual application does not use the figure in the exams.
The choice over whether to produce a team plan will lie primary with the team manager, although the team manager may well discuss this with the project manager.
The decision hinges on whether the team manager thinks that they can control the delivery of the work package using just the stage plan.
If the project is a big ones and the stage plan, therefore is still relatively high level, there may not be enough detail in the plan for effective work package control. In that case, the team manager will develop a team plan.
This will be checked out with the project manager to make sure it is consistent with the relevant part of the stage plan.
The cascade of exception management
To put it simply exception management is where the work is allocated with plus and minus limits within which the job must be accomplished. The most common limits are time and cost.
While work is proceeding on track to end somewhere between the upper and lower limits, the manager in charge of the work can continue. However, if at any point the work is forecast to go above an upper limit or fall below and lower limits, then the matter must be reported immediately.
Exception management is an important control in PRINCE2. When you first learn about it you will probably do so in the context of stage management, within limits are set by the project board to define the project managers delegated authority for that stage.
However, exception works at more than one level, in the context of this process, managing product delivery, you need to appreciate that tolerance limits may have been set for the team manager by the project manager.
Those tolerances will be recorded in the work package. If, at any time during the work, the team manager calculates that this assignment will finish outside one or more of the tolerance limits, then the work package is said to be in exception – hence the name of this control being exception management.
It is possible that an exception on the work package – where it is projected to exceed the tolerance limits – may send the whole stage into exception, and so the matter will need to be referred to the project board.
It is important to appreciate however, that if this is the case, then the matter he’s being referred to the project board because it is a stage or exception, not because it is a work package exception.
An exception is reported to the management level above – to the level that set the tolerances. It may well be that the work package exception sets off a cascade and even the project ends up in exception, in which case the executive will need to report it to corporate or programme management.
PRINCE2 – iterative teamwork
Each team will receive one or more work packages in a stage, so the process is repeated, potentially many times, in each stage as each team works on the work package.
Different iterations of the process can be running at the same time and be at different points.
So, as an example, while one team is hard at work building and testing products, the team manager of another is just receiving the next work package for the team, while a third team manager is in the process of notifying the project manager that the work package is now complete.
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