PRINCE2 Progress Practice
PRINCE2 Progress Practice Exam Nuggets
This article will give you the key points and exam tips for the PRINCE2 progress practice to score well in your exams.
The purpose of the Progress Practice is to set up and establish appropriate mechanisms to monitor the actual achievements against what was planned and, from that comparison, provide a forecast for the project objectives and its continued viability.
Any unacceptable deviations from what was planned must be controlled by taking appropriate corrective action.
PRINCE2 Progress Practice – Tolerances.
Corporate or programme management set project-level tolerances before the project is approved at the end of the initiation stage. Similarly, the project board set stage-level tolerances before the authorization of the next stage plan.
In this way, the project manager has some form of tolerance (and hence permissible deviation from the plan) within which to manage. The project manager does this by comparing actual performance against planned performance and taking some form of corrective action – providing that the result of this corrective action keeps the project performance within tolerance bounds.
PRINCE2 tolerance is; “the permissible deviation above and below a plan’s target for time and cost without escalating the deviation up to the next level of management.”
Remember, each project is unique so each project may need different tolerance types and the amount of deviation.
PRINCE2 states that seven types of tolerances may be applied to a specific project and, indeed, to specific stages. These tolerances are; time, cost, quality, scope, benefit, sustainability, and risk.
Whenever the project manager first forecasts that a project or stage is likely to exceed its tolerance bounds, they must log this as an issue and raise an exception report for the project board, who may then transmit it upwards to corporate or programme management should the report indicate that project tolerance is forecast to be exceeded.
In addition to corporate or programme management setting project tolerances and the project board setting stage tolerances, the project manager may optionally set Work Package tolerances on one or more of these stages work packages as part of delegating the work package to the team manager and specialist team.
Management products that set product tolerances.
The Project Plan is where cost, time and scope project-level tolerances are documented. Stage level tolerances are documented in the Stage Plan, and Work Package tolerances are documented within the Work Package.
- Risk tolerances for project and stage levels are documented within the Risk Management Approach document (part of the Project Initiation Documentation) and at a Work Package level within the Work Package itself.
- Risk tolerances at a stage and Work Package level may also be documented at a stage or Team Plan level.
- Quality tolerances are documented within the Project Product Description or Product Descriptions.
- Benefit tolerances are documented within the project Business Case.
Reporting exceptions.
It is the team manager’s role to report a forecast Work Package level exception by raising it as an issue within the Issue Log, which is sent to the project manager.
The project manager reports stage-level exceptions by escalating via an Issue Report or an Exception Report to the project board. As mentioned, the project board will report any project-level exceptions by notifying corporate or programme management.
The Exception Report.
The project manager will create an Exception Report during the Controlling a Stage process if they forecast that stage tolerance will be exceeded.
The Exception Report provides information about the exception for the project board and includes options that have been considered to deal with the exception. This allows the project board to decide on this situation within the Directing a Project process.
There are four levels of management within PRINCE2, and starting at the highest they are;
- business or commissioning level,
- project board,
- project manager, and the
- The team manager or the specialist team.
The Work Package.
It is essential to understand the purpose and composition of the Work Package and to know in which processes the Work Package is developed, used and reviewed, in addition to the responsible roles.
The project manager creates the Work Package in the Controlling a Stage process to define the information the team manager or team needs to deliver one or more products. Once the team manager or a team member has accepted the Work Package within the Managing Product Delivery process, they are responsible for delivering the described product.
The Daily Log.
This is used to record any informal issues along with their required actions, or more, any significant events not caught by other PRINCE2 registers and logs. The Daily Log acts as the project diary for the project manager.
Event-driven and time-driven controls.
You must understand the difference between these two types of controls.
Event driven controls are used to control a specific event that has occurred. Two examples are at the end of a particular stage or an exception.
By contrast, time-driven controls do not respond to an event but instead occur at a regular frequency or passage of time. Two examples here are the creation of a Highlight Report or a Checkpoint Report.
It is essential to know which processes the Lessons Log is developed, used, and reviewed, along with the roles responsible for this.
The Lessons Log
The project manager creates the Lessons Log within the Starting Up a Project process and updates it throughout the project as necessary.
The project manager uses the Lessons Log to collate lessons learned from previous similar initiatives that may be useful for the current project. In addition, the Lessons Log collates experience from the current projects that might be useful for future initiatives.
The Lessons Report.
It is essential to understand the purpose and composition, in which processes it is developed, used and reviewed, and which roles are responsible for carrying this out.
The Lessons Report can be created at any time in the project but is typically created during the Managing a Stage Boundary process and embedded within the End Stage Report. In addition, during the Closing a Project process, the Lessons Report may also become part of the End Project Report.
Management stages.
You must understand what factors should be considered when dividing the project into management stages.
At minimum, a PRINCE2 project will contain two stages: the initiation stage and one delivery stage (where the specialist products are created).
PRINCE2 recommends five factors to consider when dividing the project up into management stages, and these are:
- How far ahead is it sensible to plan
- Where the critical decision points within a project
- The amount of risk within a project (and hence the management team’s appetite for risk)
- How confident the project management team is in proceeding with the project
- Balancing too many short management stages against too few in length.
The last point above is a balance of many short management stages, resulting in higher management overhead, and too few long stages, resulting in little control over the project.
Finally, it is essential to understand the concepts of management stages and their difference from technical stages:
Management stages are committed to the commitment of resources and authority to spend, while technical stages are typified by using a particular set of specialist skills. Therefore, it is quite common for a management stage to contain one or more technical stages, and by the same token, a technical stage may traverse more than one management stage.
Indeed, as part of deciding how many management stages and where their start and finish points should be, one such decision may be based upon a particularly long technical stage that would be split at some point during its duration by the completion of one management stage and the start of the following management stage.
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