PRINCE2 End Stage Report – the steps to its creation
The PRINCE2 process Managing a Stage Boundary is used to either prepare for an end-stage assessment, or an exception assessment. For this article, I will concentrate on the former.
The purpose of a PRINCE2 end-stage assessment it is to provide the project board with sufficient information to make an informed choice about whether to proceed with the project or not.
Before discussing the content of an end-stage report, is therefore important to understand the sources of information that will be included within it. It makes sense, therefore, to first look at the activities within the Managing a Stage Boundary process itself.
Managing a Stage Boundary
The following diagram shows the typical route:
When the project manager sees the current stage nearing completion, it will trigger him to refer to the Managing a Stage Boundary process as above.
The first step this to create the next stage plan which will be drawn from the top-level details within the project plan.
The PRINCE2 Stage Plan
Using the PRINCE2 technique of product-based planning, these top-level details will be decomposed into a detailed level suitable for day-to-day management within the next stage.
The project manager will want to involve as many appropriate and relevant people as possible to ensure a robust and achievable stage plan is created. In particular specialists team members, senior suppliers, and project assurance should be involved in creating the next stage plan.
The project initiation document should be referenced, in particular, for the relevant standard documents, since risk, quality, configuration management, and communication aspects of the project will heavily influence the next stage plan.
As part of Product-Based planning, new products will be identified. These may consist of further refined existing products or entirely new products. Whichever the case may be, new product descriptions will need to be created along with their relevant quality criteria.
The Quality Register will need to be updated with the relevant information for carrying out quality checks within the next stage.
Also, configuration item records will need to be created or modified for each new product to track the status of that product.
As part of carrying out planning for the next stage, new or modified risks may be identified, and these too will need to be entered into the risk register and their appropriate response actions included within the next stage plan.
Similarly any ongoing issues and their actions may need to be included within the plan (unless they are currently being dealt with).
As a consequence of creating a more detailed next-stage plan, the project plan will more likely need to be updated and refined. There are several reasons for this:
- The newly created next-stage plan will normally have a different stage end date, a different cost, different products, and different resources to those originally estimated within the project plan
- Since the current stage is now coming to a close, actual information such as products, cost, and end dates will now need to be entered into the updated project plan
- The business environment may have changed since the project initiation document was signed off. For example, the user group may have different objectives, or market forces may have changed
- Once the project plan has been updated, the business case also needs to be updated to ensure that the project is still providing continued business justification. For example, project or operational costs may rise, schedules may be delayed, or new competitors may have arrived and hence the project end product may need to be modified or enhanced.
Typically, the project manager and the project board executive will review sections of the business case and update them as necessary.
In a similar way to the above, the project manager and executive should review the organization’s risk appetite and the overall risk situation to ensure that it remains within risk tolerances.
They should also review the benefits review plan to ensure there has been updated that the results of any benefit reviews that may have taken place, and that such results should be compared with the expected results. Similarly, any planned benefit reviews are included in the stage plan and the project plan.
All of the above culminate in the creation of the End Stage Report as shown in this activity:
In the report stage end activity, the End Stage Report will be created which will be reviewed by the project board along with the other outputs of the managing a stage boundary process to decide whether to proceed to the next stage of the project or not.
As you can see in the diagram above, the project manager may wish to create a lessons report, particularly if certain lessons should be applied to the remainder of this project or would be useful to other projects at this point.
PRINCE2 Lessons Report
It might be useful to remind you of the content and structure of a lessons report. This covers what went well, what went badly, plus any recommendations.
This should cover:
- Project management method
- Specialist methods used
- Project strategies
- Project controls
- Any abnormal events
- Scope (project or stage)
- Executive summary
Review of any useful measurements such as the effectiveness of the Quality Management Approach
Significant lessons may be clarified with details on:
- Details of the event and its effect/impact
- Causes or trigger
- The work effort needed to create products
- Early-warning indicators
- Recommendations
- Was the triggered event identifies as a risk?
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