PRINCE2 7 Principles Demystified – Part 1
The PRINCE2 7 method consists of the seven Principles, seven Processes, and seven Practices.
So, what are the most obvious relationships between the PRINCE2 7Principles and the PRINCE2 Practices?
The best way to see this is that the PRINCE2 Principles represent best practice and that the PRINCE2 Practices are disciplines of project management.
The Tailoring PRINCE2 7to the project environment Principle is applied to all the Practices since tailoring can affect any aspect or element of your project and hence the application of PRINCE2 7.
The following diagram summarizes how the seven Principles are applied to each of the seven Themes:
Will now describe each Principle in a little more detail:
PRINCE2 7 – Ensure continued Business Justification
This is the Principle that the business case must remain valid throughout, otherwise the project should be changed or shut down. This Principle is fundamental to the Business Case Practice.
There is also a strong relationship between the Ensure Continued Business Justification Principle and the Risk Practice. Since risk is all about uncertainty, and since projects always introduce change of some sort, then uncertainty always exists on projects.
Even a small thought project is likely to have risks of some sort, so if the business case has not identified any risks, it is questionable whether the business case has been thoroughly sort through.
PRINCE2 7 – Define Roles, Responsibilities and Relationsips
It is obvious that every project has people involved, and everyone should have a clear role defined, and fully understand their responsibilities within that role. This PRINCE2 Principle lies at the heart of the Organization Theme in which the various roles and their associated responsibilities are defined.
It is worth reminding ourselves of the four levels contained within the project management hierarchy where each level reports into and is accountable to, the level above
Corporate or Programme management. These roles act as the sponsors of the project and provide the project with its project mandate. If the project forms part of a programme then it is obvious that there will be a layer of program management – typically called the Programme Board, that sits above the top of the structure.
If the project is standalone, there is often a layer of corporate management sitting above the Project Board. In some situations, it may be possible that some or all the members of the Project Board may themselves be the corporate management who provides the Project Mandate.
The Project Board.
This is made up of three roles:
- The Executive has the controlling vote and represents the business all financial interest on the project and makes sure that it delivers value for money
- The Senior User who represents the user interests. Users are those people who define their requirements in terms of what they want the specialist products of the project to deliver for them and then check these products when they are complete to ensure they are of the requisite quality
- The Senior Supplier. This role represents the supplier’s interests, and suppliers are those people who will create or procure the specialist products
The Project Manager. This role is responsible for the day-to-day control of the project and undertakes the clear majority of the activities of the project, including preparing most of the management products
Team managers. This role manages is the team members. Typically, these take the form of supplier teams developing specialist products. They may be programmers, architects and builders, or any number of other specialists depending upon the nature of the project.
Supply and teams can be internal or external to the host organization or a combination of the two. There may also be user teams.
PRINCE2 7 – Manage by exception
You may have heard of red-amber-green reporting using the traffic light approach within progress reports. Although better than nothing, it is often up to the Project Manager along with consultation with the Project Board, to use their own discretion as to what should be coloured amber or red.
PRINCE2 Management by exception is different from this in TWO ways. The first is that rather than discretion, it uses defined, measurable tolerance to determine whether something is in exception.
Second, these tolerances are all handed down by the level of management above. As an example, here, the Project Board might say to the Project Manager that the tolerance for the next stage is £250K plus and minus £20K and 2 months plus and minus one week.
This infers that if the Project Manager can forecast that they can complete the stage within the above tolerance limits, all the Project Manager must do is to send regular progress reports. In addition, Using PRINCE2 Management by exception, there is no need for the Project Board and Project Manager to meet up on a regular basis.
Based on the above, it would seem that management by exception has no amber warning. But this is not so, As the above tolerances could be split to represent an amber warning prior to the red warning and to trigger of exception.
As part of management by exception, the Project Manager receives regular progress reports from the specialist team and these are called Checkpoint Reports. They may be a report or they may be a meeting.
In addition, the Project Manager sends regular reports to the Project Board and these are called Highlight Reports.
Within each Checkpoint Report and Highlight Report, there is a section for major issues and risks, as well as an opportunity for the Project Manager to show how much of tolerance has been used so far.
As you can infer from all the above the Themes in which the management by exception Principle is imbedded are the Change Theme and Progress Theme.
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