PRINCE2

PRINCE2 is a generic project management method, with a formal set of accompanying certifications. It stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments. Although it was originally developed for IT projects, it's now commonly used in a variety of industries and businesses.

Its basis comprises seven principles, seven themes, and seven processes.

• Seven principles: Continued business justification; learn from experience; defined roles and responsibilities; manage by stages; manage by exception; focus on products; and tailor to suit the project environment.
• Seven themes: Business case, organization, quality, plans, risk, change, and progress.
• Seven processes: Starting up a project, directing a project, initiating a project, controlling a stage, managing product delivery, managing stage boundaries, and closing a project.

For our purposes, we'll concentrate on the key practical and usable elements of PRINCE2. The underlying theory and structure are important, but ultimately, it's about the application of the method, which is done via the delivery of artifacts. PRINCE2 calls these artifacts Management Products.

In the early stages of a project, the most important management product is the PID. This is the output of the third process, called Initiating the Project. This should include the overall business case, scope, and project team, in addition to setting out the controls to be used during the project.

These controls should include various logs and registers, which are also management products. The issues, risk, quality register, and daily log, as well as other products, are often combined into a RAID log.

RAID stands for Risks, Actions, Issues, and Decisions, sometimes known as dependencies. This is usually a large spreadsheet with different tabs for each section. Unless there is an extremely good reason not to have one, I would insist that all projects should have a RAID log, and the project team should use and keep it up to date.

The Lessons Log is a management product that's often forgotten about on account of its nature of predominantly helping the next project rather than the current one. However, if it's used correctly through the life cycle, especially for large projects, it can be extremely valuable in the latter stages to help avoid recurring or lingering problems. In a strict PRINCE2 practicing environment, a Lessons Report must be produced in order to complete the Closing a Project process. This will rely on information from the Lessons Log.

You may have noticed that conceptually and practically, PRINCE2 seems longer than Agile and Waterfall. This is because it simply has more entities, products, and processes within its premise of control. This is the reason why only select parts of PRINCE2 tend to be adopted and practiced. As well as the effort to follow it, there will also be a significant overhead for a PMO to govern it across all projects.