How to Revise the PRINCE2 7 Managing a Stage Boundary – Part 1
Managing a stage boundary is probably the most important control and the process itself is really quite straightforward.
The stage boundaries form key points where the project board will check that the project is in good shape, and then specifically authorize the next “chunk” of work – that is, the next stage.
As a way of seeing how simple the managing a stage boundary process is, imagine that you are a senior executive being asked to invest several million pounds sterling on the next stage of a large and important project.
You would rightly be feeling a little nervous because if a project fails your name will be on the authority allowed it to continue.
So as the project board member, what type of information would you want to know before giving the authority to proceed?
There are basically three views that you would take:
Looking back.
- For the stage that is just finishing, how did it go?
- Did it deliver smoothly or where they’re problems with warning signs of more severe things to come?
- Was the spending according to plan?
- Did the plan accurately reflect the work, or was extra central work found there had been missed off the plan, which in turn resulted in lots of changes and re-forecasting of estimates?
Looking at where the project is now
- Is the project still justified, is the business case still sound?
- Are the benefit projections Sellers they were at the start, or better?
- What is the total risk position?
- If the negative risk has increased considerably and the benefit projections have reduced significantly, perhaps you should ¬ and instead you should be thinking about shutting the project down
Looking ahead
What about the stage plan for the next stage? Is it sensible, complete, realistic and achievable?
If you sign it but you don’t believe it is achievable then you are just asking for a project failure.
All three of these views are fine, look back, the present position and the look forward. In this situation you would probably be willing to sign the authority.
So you can see that the three views sum up what managing a stage boundary is all about. The process covers the work of the project manager getting exactly the information together to presented to the project board.
Given that logic, the activities are straightforward enough.
The pattern in PRINCE2, as in most staged approach is to projects, is that the stage planning is done towards the end of the previous stage, using the very latest information available.
It does not make sense in most projects to plan everything in fine detail at the beginning, because so much can change as the project progresses.
Such change can be in the business environment, with technology, with resource in or in the light of what happens in the earlier parts of the project. There is a slight difference when the process is triggered by an exception, but I will cover that in the next part of this article.
Revising the PRINCE2 Managing a Stage Boundary process
There are two product related areas of work for the project manager within this process. The first is producing you management products, notably the stage plan for the next stage. The second area is to update ongoing project documentation such as the project plan and the project approach.
As you revise the process, watch out for poorly named activities. The most misleading is the activity “update the project plan” which actually covers much more than updating the project plan.
It involves checking the project initiation documentation (PID) and updating anything that needs it, including the approaches. To remind you, there are four approach documents; risk, quality, change control, and communication.
In the list of recommended actions for the activity, the official PRINCE2 Manual gives a few examples of changes that may be needed, but be aware that the changes can go wider than the examples given.
Those of you who already know PRINCE2, appreciate the need to update the PID on the stage boundary anyway, so in practice it does not cause too much of a problem.
The Manual is very much harder to follow if you are learning PRINCE2 for the first time, and you find it hard text to follow will find that it assumes prior knowledge.
A second activity with a rather misleading name is “update the business case”, which indeed performs a updates, but also the related product, the benefits management approach. This activity will also update a couple of registers as well, the risk register and the issue register.
The process managing a stage boundary is not actually very difficult to understand, but it can seem so at first until you get the idea of the overall structure. Your understanding hinges on appreciating the two triggers -that of preparing for the next stage, or responding to the project board request to create an exception plan.
The normal trigger of the process is when the project manager is checking out the status of the current stage and seized at the end of the stage is getting close. The project manager realizes that it is time to start preparing for the next stage and getting ready for the project board check of the project at the end stage assessment.
Effectively, the project manager fires of the stage boundary process and starts work on the next stage plan.
The second trigger is when a stage has gone into exception part way through, and the project manager realizes that the stage is going to breach one or more of the limits such as time and cost set by the project board. These are called tolerances.
To get out of the problem, everyone realizes that the rest of the stage, and perhaps the remainder of the project, is now going to have to be done differently from how it was originally planned.
Clearly then, the existing stage plan will be of no use, so the project board instructs the project manager to prepare an exception plan.
That instruction forces a stage boundary that was not originally intended. The work done up to this point in the stage is closed down as an end stage, and there is an end stage report for it.
The remaining work in the stage is replant by creating an exception plan. Because the plan is at stage level, but may also include an update to the project plan, it must be approved by the project board, so it goes to the project board in the same way as at any end stage.
The main difference is that this time the board meeting is called an exception assessment.
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