PRINCE2 Roles and Responsibilities

PRINCE2 Roles and Responsibilities in your project organization

PRINCE2 does not define jobs allocated to people, but rather, it defines roles each with a set of responsibilities. Each role may have one person or several people filling it, an individual may fulfill more than one role.

What is important is that the right people are chosen for each roles and responsibilities, and this would include the individual’s knowledge, skills, experience, authority, credibility, commitment and availability.

PRINCE2 has a reserved term for the project board, project manager, and some optional roles and responsibilities, and this term is called the Project Management Team.

A PRINCE2 project always have three primary categories of stakeholder, and these roles and responsibilities must always be included if the project is to be successful.

The three primary interests that make up the project board roles and responsibilities are the Business interest – the Business Case should provide value for money, the User interest – these will use the project’s outputs either to realise the benefits, they may operate, maintain or support the project outputs, and these outputs will impact them, and the Supplier interest – these supply the resources and skills to produce a project’s products.

There are four levels of a PRINCE2 project organisation roles and responsibilities

Among the Project Board roles and responsibilities include being accountable for the success or failure of the project, providing unified direction, providing the resources and authorising the project funding, and ensuring effective decision-making.

Let's look at these levels

The Project Board should have the right level of authority, be credible, have the ability to delegate, and be available for whenever that decisions and directions are needed.

The Project Board Executive roles and responsibilities is ultimately accountable for the project success and has the veto on any decision making.  The executive is responsible for the Business Case.

The Senior User roles and responsibilities represents those who will use the project’s products and also those who will use the products to achieve an objective or deliver benefits.  The Senior User specifies the benefits and is held to account by corporate or programme management.

The Senior Supplier role represents those who will design, develop, facilitate, procure, and implement the project’s products.  This role is responsible for the technical integrity of the project.

Each Project Board member is responsible for their own assurance, business, user and supplier.  Collectively, this role is called Project Assurance.  Each project board member can perform their own project assurance, or they may choose to delegate it.

Project assurance roles and responsibilities must be independent of the Project Manager and the team and are also responsible for supporting the project manager by giving advice and guidance.

If the project is likely to have many change requests, then the project board during the initiation stage, need to decide whether they have the time to make decisions on these changes, or whether they wish to set up a Change Authority who will act upon their behalf.  They would need to agree to ‘rules of engagement’.

For example, the project board may only deal with changes above a certain monetary value.  The Project Board may also wish to consider allocating a separate change budget to pay for such changes.

The Project Board should not exceed six to eight people otherwise decision-making can be slowed, it is a good idea to consider having off-line supplier and user meetings, and bring a representative back to the project board to act on their behalf..

The project manager roles and responsibilities is responsible for day-to-day management of the project and will delegate responsibility for the creation of products to the team manager or specialist team members themselves.

The team manager roles and responsibilities if they are appointed, then the project manager gives the Work Packages to the team manager, and the team manager will give the project manager regular Checkpoint Reports. The Team Manager will therefore perform the daily management of the team members.

Another optional role is the use of Project Support.  This group's roles and responsibilities will provide administrative services to the project, give advice and guidance on the use of project management tools, and will normally provide configuration management.  It project support is not available, then the project manager will have to do it themselves.