PRINCE2 Management Stage and a Technical Stage – the differences!
One of the most puzzling aspects of PRINCE2, is the understanding and intelligent use of management stages, and when running training sessions, it is critically important to explain the difference between management and technical stages.
Consider a typical project for a moment.
In your first high-level planning session as part of your project plan, you and your team will think through the technical or specialist work that needs to be carried out. This is often done under headings such as specification and design, development, build, test and install
One of the most puzzling aspects of PRINCE2 is the understanding and intelligent use of management stages. When running training sessions, explaining the difference between management and technical stages is critically important.
Each of these should be seen as a technical stage.
But before we go any further, I want to introduce the concept of PRINCE2 management stages.
The Project Board provides resource authority to the project manager to manage only one stage at a time, and at the end of each stage, the project manager must report back to the project board and seek permission to move on to the next stage.
Unlike technical stages, management stages do not overlap and can only occur one management stage at a time. To do this, the project manager creates a high-level Project Plan splitting the project into sensible management stages. The Project Board must agree and authorize the project plan as part of exiting the Initiation stage and proceeding to the first/only delivery stage.
As the end of each management stage is reached, the project manager creates a detailed plan for the following management stage and presents this to the project board and other information to seek permission to proceed.
A PRINCE2 project has, at minimum, just two management stages; the initiation stage (where the project initiation documentation contained in the project plan will be created) and a second and final delivery stage.
For most projects, however, there will be a need for more than one delivery stage. The following diagram demonstrates that principle:
As you can see, management stages are defined as “partitions of the project with management decision points, and equate to the commitment of resources and authority to spend.”
This means that the project board releases resources and budget to the project manager on a management stage-by-management stage basis.
A management stage – how many should a project have?
How far ahead in the project is it sensible to plan? This might be as simple as answering, “Can we plan the development in detail until he has agreed on the specification?”
Where are the critical decision points going to be? This will give the first clues as to how many stages and where in time they should begin and end.
How risky is the project? High-risk projects will have a shorter duration of management stages to allow more control by the project board. However, This will result in the project manager reporting back to the project board more frequently.
How confident is the project management team about the project?” Low confidence will tend to cause the need for shorter and more frequent management stages.
Is the project part of a larger initiative such as a programme? If so, aligning management stages with key milestone points in such a programme may be best.
Management stages are set to align with critical deliverables handed over to the customer at various time points within a project.
So how are technical stages aligned with management stages?
Technical stages are, in reality, a group of activities carried out by one or more people with the same skills. Such technical stages may traverse more than one management stage.
Technical stages are therefore typified by using a particular set of specialist skills.
So check out the following diagram showing a set of technical stages traversing the whole of the project:
How exactly do we overlay technical stages within the management stages?
And what happens when a particular technical stage needs to traverse more than one management stage?
The answers are to consider the following points:
The mindset here is to think “whole products” when splitting a technical stage across multiple management stages.
When asking a team member how much percentage complete we are, you will only get a subjective answer, but requesting which products have been completed will remove the ambiguity.
So you will get very effective progress control by aligning specialist product completion with stage boundaries.
This will give the Project Board detailed progress data upon which to decide whether to proceed or not.
So where technical stages traverse a Management Stage boundary, consider splitting the technical stages (and maybe slightly modifying the Management Stage boundary to coincide with the completion of a full or partial specialist product:
Finally, let us look at crucial understanding points regarding management and technical stages:
Management and technical stages sometimes start at different times.
Management stages must not overlap.
Technical stages can overlap – and this is often a way to use specialist skills and availability effectively.
An example. Why would you want to wait until ALL the offices in a building have been wired and decorated before moving the desks and furniture to SOME of them?
Another example. Before finishing the technical stage of ‘design’, you could start on the technical stage of ‘test’ to carry that out on any of the project modules that have been designed at that point.
You can have more than one of the technical stages traversing each management stage.
You can have more than one management stage traversing over one technical stage (but the management stages do not overlap!)
Okay, this blog should clarify any confusion between the definition and application of management and technical stages within a PRINCE2 project!
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