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All Access Tailoring the ‘INITIATING A PROJECT’ Process
HOW THE VARIOUS TAILORING APPROACHES ARE IMPLEMENTED
Here, I will focus on how the PRINCE2 initiating a project process can be tailored or adapted.
Dave Litten – Principal PRINCE2 Instructor
On a smaller and simple project, the project initiation documentation might be a fairly simple documents or maybe a set of presentation slides.Â
Tailoring the requirements
Once all the activities in the starting up a project process are finished, the project manager will send a request to initiate a project to the project board. The project board considers this request in the directing a project process using the authorize initiation activity.
The project board may or may not do this in a formal meeting, but the basis of their decision will be all the information contained within the project brief. They can also use project assurance to review this material and test its validity.
Sometimes at this early point in the initiative, there may be no senior supplier representative – for example, if an unnamed source supplier has not been contacted at this point.
Even without the senior supplier, PRINCE2 allows the project board to authorize the initiation stage, although it would be a good idea to represent the outsourced supplier by a proxy – may be using the procurement department.
When tailoring, some of the components of the project initiation documentation might be combined. For example, there might be an overall management approach document rather than separate ones for risk, quality, change control, and communication.
Also, rather than having separate risk and issue registers, these documents might be combined. A common way of doing this is by creating A RAID log. This stands for risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies. Since RAID is not a PRINCE2 term you will not be tested on this in the exams.
In addition to the above and actions for small projects, the management products might be adapted in a number of other ways.
The area of change control is referred to by different names in different industries. For example, in an engineering project, it might be called asset management. For a project that creates documents, it might be called version control. It would be best to use these industry specific terms when naming the change control approach.
In some environments, it is common to have a change register as well as the issue register. In this case, the quality register might be far more complex will split up into a number of into related documents.
Particularly in larger projects, the project initiation documentation is rarely a single document, but a group of connected documents, such as reports, presentation slides, or information garnered from planning software tools such as Microsoft project.
One of the key ways that PRINCE2 projects are tailored is through using organizational or industry specific methods of managing areas such as quality and risk. These will be describes in the approach is that are created during the initiating a project process.
If the project is part of a programme, there might be programme will lead approaches to management areas such as risk, quality, change control, or communication.
If this is the case, there might not be a need to create separate approaches for the project, or maybe the project approaches might simply refer to the programme approaches while highlighting some deviations that are peculiar to the project.
Often in a programme situation, someone such as a business change manager is responsible for the realization of the benefits for the entire programme. If this is the case, the benefits management approach is likely to be created at the program level by the business change manager rather them by the project manager.
The initiating a project process might be adapted in a number of ways if an agile approach is used.
The product descriptions that appeared in the project plan might be written in the form of user stories or epics. Also, only high level product descriptions might be used, with an allowable flexibility on the detailed specifications.
In fact, the project product description and the main product descriptions in the project plan might focus more on the required outcome all value that the product will bring, rather than its specifications.
When using an agile approach to plan the project, the project management team needs to take into account the level of uncertainty. If there is a great deal of uncertainty about how the products will be built, the project manager might include some agile ‘spikes’ early on in the plan.
A spike is eight time-limited investigation into a technical area, so that the team can ascertain how much time and effort will be needed to build certain products and what approach works best.
It might involve building a number of experimental prototypes. A similar approach might be used if the client is unclear about their requirements.
In this case, the project manager might include activities in the project plan where the delivery teams build a number of mock-ups to show the client in order to get their feedback on what they like and don’t like.
If the project teams delivering the work to an external client, the project initiation documentation might form the basis of a legal contract. It is best to keep the legal contract and project initiation documentation as separate documents with a legal contract referring to the project documentation as necessary.
This will help minimize the need for expensive legal counsel when making any changes to the project documentation.
If the project will outsource a lot of the delivery work to a separate third party organization, some of the activities in the initiating a project process are likely to take place before the customer has signed a contract with the suppliers.
This is because the supplier needs to investigate the approaches, plans, and controls in order to assess the viability and desirability of getting involved with the project. However, initiating a project cannot be completed until the contract has been signed and the customer’s project board or to rise is the project.
Using PRINCE2 to Sell Projects
Many companies sell projects such as building firms that sell their ability to deliver construction projects, software companies that deliver bespoke software, and office moving companies that deliver projects to move office furniture.
One of the challenges for the project team was that the sales teams would often promised potential clients unrealistic delivery dates and miscommunicate the scope of the products that would be delivered.
This of course, causes a lot of problems when the project was handed over from the sales team to the delivery team.
A resolution to this problem is to set up a Handover process between the sales team and the project teams based on PRINCE2.
Every time a salesperson’s future potential client was about to sign up for the company’s services, they would put a proposal together for that client. A representative from the project team should be assigned to help them.
The proposal needs to be based on the PRINCE2 project brief document.
If the client decided to proceed with the work, it was with the understanding that there be some time devoted to expanding on this project brief proposal in the form of assembling the project initiation documentation.
At this point, any significant new pieces of information that may arise, would be considered by all parties and may result in the project brief proposal being changed to reflect these new information.
Ultimately, this approach will need two more satisfied customers.
Tailoring the Approaches
In PRINCE2, the project initiation documentation broadly contains the project plan, the business case, the approaches to manage risk, quality, change control and communication aspects, the project controls, and how PRINCE2 will be tailored to suit this specific project.
These approaches will want to be tailored to suit the type, size, risk, and industry that the project will be delivered within. In the next sections, I will briefly describe how such approaches might be implemented:
Quality management procedure
This is the set of activities undertaken to ensure the project builds the right products. The project team will want to identify who will use the products and determine their requirements.
This will then be documented so that product acceptance will be successful. Another question that needs to be asked is all there any particular dates, times, or schedules that are important to ensure the project is building the correct products. This might be at the end of each stage of the project where project assurance will carry out an audit of all the quality checks that have occurred.
Another key area here is determining the roles and responsibilities for building the correct products and who will check the products are to being built as well as who will sign off acceptance on the half of the customer.
There may be special techniques used in checking the products, or maybe quality standards that need to be followed. Another consideration in tailoring is to determine what quality reports need to be created, sent to, and the format they need to have. A final consideration here is the possible creation of quality records showing who was involved in these checks, the dates they occurred, and whether the quality check passed or failed.
Tailoring the risk management approach
The risk management approach sets out the six pieces of information common to all approaches: the procedure, timings, roles and responsibilities, tools and techniques, reporting, and records.
An important tailoring aspect specifies the threshold of risk that corporate, programme management, the customer, or the project board are willing to accept – their risk tolerance levels.
The type of risk tools and their approaches will also need to be tailored to suit the level of risk expected within this project.
Tailoring the quality management approach
To carry out the stage during, the project manager should review the project’s product description that was created within the starting up a project process.
This describes at a high level, the specification for the main product that the project will need to create. The project manager will also need to take into account any organizational quality approaches are both the customers and suppliers involved with the project.
Tailoring the change control approach
This too, is the job of the project manager, and describes how the project team will manage and control any proposed changes to the projects products as well as how to manage and control issues that arise during the project.
Tailoring of the approach will include how to capture proposed issue and change is, how to evaluate them, and then authorize any proposed response to them at an appropriate level of authority.
Tailoring the communication management approach
This describes how the project team will manage communications between the people on the project management team as well as between the project and stakeholders outside the project team.
One consideration here is whether the project manager needs to conduct a stakeholder analysis during the starting up a project process. If this is the case, the project manager should review the results of that work and is necessary conduct further analysis.
Tailoring the project controls
Just about anything that ensures that the project is heading toward its objectives can be seen as a project control. Of particular importance here, is how the project plan will be divided into stages and when the end stage assessment meetings between the project and the project manager will occur.
As part of tailoring, the project manager may need to set up new responsibilities for the various project management team roles and add these responsibilities to the role descriptions while making sure the individuals concerned and accept such amendments.
Tailoring the project plan
The project plan shows how the major products in the project will be delivered. For large projects, the project plan will be a high level plan, with the details being added prior to each end stage assessment for the next stage plan.
The project plan should be based on the information contained within the project brief, and this will include aspects such as important delivery dates and the project approach.
As part of tailoring, the project manager needs to decide how to format the project plan, for example the use of a Gantt chart format.
The project manager needs to decide what estimating techniques will be used. PRINCE2 plans can say not only schedule information such as tasks, dates, and resources, but also detailed specification of the products that will be built during that plan.
PRINCE2 uses the product-based planning technique, and as part of tailoring, the project manager will need to identify the major deliverables and create product descriptions for these.
Tailoring the benefits management approach
This is created by the project manager who will use the benefits management approach to specify how achievements of the project benefits will be measured and what management actions will be needed. Such actions will most likely be after the project to ensure that the benefits have been achieved.
The final aspects of tailoring will be as all the above information is assembled together to form the project initiation documentation. The project initiation documentation will be tailored not just in terms of the level and type of information within it, but also its format such as whether it is a single document or a collection of related documents.
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