A PRINCE2 Plan should provide information on what is required, how it would be achieved and by whom and when events will happen, and it should prove that time, cost, quality, scope, risk, and benefit targets are achievable.
When starting a journey, you will always need a plan; without one, there is no control.
Once a PRINCE2 plan has been created, it will be approved by the project board and used as a baseline reference against which progress can be tracked and measured.
In PRINCE2, a plan is not just a schedule; it is a comprehensive document describing how, when and by whom a specific set of targets is to be achieved. Plans are the backbone of the management information system. Planning is the act of creating and maintaining a plan; as such, it is essential.
The product planning technique is used to create any PRINCE2 Plan. This entails identifying the products or deliverables in the plan and the activities and resources to develop such products. Product-based planning is essential for project control.
The planning horizon is the period for which it is possible to plan accurately, and it is seldom desirable or possible to plan an entire project at the start. For this reason, PRINCE2 recommends different levels of planning to reflect the needs of the different levels of management involved in the project.
The Project Plan.
This covers the whole of the project, starting at the end of the initiation management stage until the end of the project (because the project plan is first created in this stage, it can only show the remainder of the project – the specialist delivery stages).
The Stage Plan (s).
These are created at the end of a delivery stage (during the Managing a Stage Boundary process) and cover the work to be done in the following management stage.
Team Plan (s).
These cover the Work Packages to be executed during a Delivery Stage. They are optional because they are only used if (say) the work package is very complex and needs precise planning or where the approved Stage Plan needs to give more detail.
Different PRINCE2 Plans – a Plan for each management level.
The project plan is created by the PRINCE2 Initiating a Project process, the Initiation Stage Plan is created within the Starting Up a Project process, and each successive Stage Plan is created by the Managing a Stage Boundary process.
The PRINCE2 Managing Product Delivery process creates optional Team Plans. Should an Exception Plan be required, and if approved, it will replace the original plan that would no longer finish within tolerances. It is, therefore, not a different level.
The only other plan in PRINCE2 is the Benefits Management Approach, and as this covers activities both during and after the project, it may be part of a corporate or program plan.
The Project Plan Provides the PRINCE2 Business Case with planned costs and timescales, identifying major control points such as a management stage and milestones. The project board uses it as a baseline against which to monitor project progress.
A management stage plan is produced for each management stage but extracts the high-level stage detail In the Project Plan and plans down to the day-to-day management level as an adequate basis for control by the project manager.
Each stage plan is created near the end of the current PRINCE2 management stage and will cover more detail but a shorter duration than the Project Plan.
The team Manager produces optional Team Plans to cover the execution of one or more Work Packages, and PRINCE2 does not prescribe the format or composition of this type of plan. Typically, the Team Manager will create their Team Plans simultaneously as the Project Manager creates the Stage Plan.
If an Exception Plan is required, it will show the necessary actions to recover from the effects of tolerance deviation. If approved, it will replace the plan that was in exception and become the new baselined Project Plan or Stage Plan.
Approval of an Exception Plan at the stage level requires approval by the project board. Still, if the Project Plan needs to be replaced, it requires corporate or programme management authorisation.
Optionally, the project manager may set tolerance at the Work Package level. If this is forecast to be exceeded by the team manager, then they should raise it as an Issue for the attention of the project manager and a decision on what to do next.
If the project manager forecasts that a Stage Plan or the Project Plan will exceed its tolerance, the project manager will raise an Exception Report.
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