The initial justification for your project is set out clearly in a Business Case. This business case is returned to on a regular basis checking its alignment with your corporate strategy. As long as the alignment is true, there is no duplication across an organisations portfolio of work and it still delivers benefit the project continues. If however justification is lost the project must be stopped to release funds and expertise to more worthwhile projects.
Learn from experience
when starting a project, similar project documentation is studied and lessons learned rooted out. If it is not using tried and trusted tech then perhaps external experience should be sought. Opportunities to improve are looked for as any project progresses. As a project closes a lessons learned asset is created to improve your organisations capability maturity.
Defined roles and responsibilities
To be successful projects must have an explicit team structure. Who is accountable for what? Who is updating whom about progress?
There are three stakeholder groups defined in PRINCE2™
Business Sponsors who endorse the products and supply / defend the funding.
Users who will use the products once the project has successfully completed. They also say when it is successful.
Suppliers who supply the resources and expertise to engineer the products.
All three stakeholders will be effectively represented in the team structure, uniting the equally important parties in the clearly defined, commmon aims of the project.
This done, success awaits.
Manage by stages
Planning beyond a certain, sensible horizon is wasteful. For example a project plan showing what everyone is doign for the next 12 months will be inaccurate after 1 month. That registers a 91.67 on the waste-of-time scale. PRINCE2™ overcomes this issue by;
Dividing the project into a number of management stages.
Having a high level project plan and a detailed current stage plan.
Planning, delegating, monitoring and controlling is applied to the currnet stage.
Manage by exception
This is all to do with governance and asigning clear accountability. The people who are carrying out work need to know how to judge if things are going well or not. And if they are not what should they do? Six dimensions are used to act as excpetion triggers.
Time: Plus or minus an amount of time one the target completion dates.
Cost: Plus or minus an amount of planned budget.
Quality: Plus or minus degrees off a quality target.
Scope: A variation to the planned products. Any variation must be agreed by the stakeholders.
Risk:(my favourite!) Limits in the aggregated acturaial risks value.
Benefit: Plus or minus degrees off an improvement goal. For example 12-24% cost reduction.
Set up regular meetings, reviews and reports to see if we have triggered an exception and tell people if we have. The team can then work on solutions or escalations as approptiate.
Senior management are assured that any and all difficulties are being exposed and managed. Their influence and assistance is easily available as required.
Focus on products
A successful project is output oriented not activity oriented. This is a critical observation for me. A PRINCE2™ project focuses on the definition and delivery of products, in particular their quality requirements from the off. The set of agreed products provides the basis for planning and control.
High quality Product descriptions provide the clarity for effort estimation, resource requirements, dependencies and schedules. They also where we define those critical quality criteria so we know when we've done a good job.
Our Product descriptions underpin almost every aspect of our project. Planning, responsibilites, status reporting, quality, change control, scope, did I mention quality?, config. management, product acceptance, quality and risk assessment (My favourite!).
Product descriptions belay several major risks like acceptance disputes, rework, scope creep and pissed off users. They are a wonder of the project management world.
Tailor to suit the project
PRINCE2™ is an extrordinarily competent project mangement system. But it's nuances are not required for every project. The project's size and complexity should be considered by the stakeholders and appropriate PRINCE2™ checks and balances selected. The elements selected will be clearly stated in the Project Initiation Documentation (PID).
