Chapter 18

Ten Ways to Make PRINCE2 Work Well

In This Chapter

Staying flexible in how you use the method

Building PRINCE2 into the organisation so that it becomes normal

Maintaining the audit function to make sure that the project runs well

A lot of people get tied up in knots with PRINCE2 and think that the method is only for very big projects because of all the overheads. Sometimes they’ve been given the impression by others that PRINCE2 is all about documentation – form filling. That’s so far from the truth. PRINCE2 is a powerful and dynamic method, but you need to use it intelligently, like any tool. Here are ten tips to help you on the way to PRINCE2 success.

Staying Flexible – Using PRINCE2 Differently

How you use PRINCE2 can be as different as your projects are from each other. Even when you repeat a project, you may want to use the method differently. Yes, yes – I know that some people say that you can’t repeat a project, but I disagree. Saying slight differences may exist is just splitting hairs.

One company involved in deep-sea surveys sends remotely operated vehicles (mini-submarines on a control cable) down to survey the sea bed, to move an oil rig or build an undersea pipeline. The company sets up and runs each survey as a project. One survey is pretty much like another, except that the sub surveys a different part of the sea bed. In a different organisation, a review of accounting procedures for compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act regarding financial disclosure may involve several projects examining different parts of the business, but the projects are all pretty similar.

Back to the point, then – even on similar projects you may use PRINCE2 differently. For two similar projects, one with a very experienced Project Manager and one with an inexperienced one, the two Project Boards may decide on very different management stages. The board with the inexperienced Project Manager want more stages and more points at which they check the state of the project. They may also require more rigorous audit (Project Assurance), and more detailed progress reports (Highlight Reports). Those variations are just three of the things that may be different just because of one factor – the experience of the Project Manager.

At the start of each project you must ask, ‘How are we going to use PRINCE2 this time?’ Keep things flexible. You have to fit PRINCE2 to the project or you end up with problems and almost certainly with unnecessarily high overheads.

A danger point for many organisations is about 12 to 15 months after they start using PRINCE2 across their projects, when they begin to ‘stiffen up’. Instead of maintaining the in-built flexibility of the method, organisations start to say, ‘This is how we do it here.’ Even worse is when a poor Project Office (see Chapter 12 for more on the Project Office) starts to impose standards so that it can get nicely uniform reports from nicely uniform information about nicely uniform projects. Unfortunately (well, for the report formatters anyway), projects are different – the important thing is running the project well, not slavish adherence to an inappropriate but ‘Project Office -friendly’ standard.

One very large multinational company used PRINCE2 very well and went past the 12 to 15 month period with no apparent ‘stiffening’ problems. I was really impressed, but then a few months later one of its Project Managers told me that he wanted to keep one of the PRINCE2 registers on a spreadsheet. He wanted to be able to use the powerful spreadsheet functions to sort entries in different ways; for example, into items still unresolved, items from a particular area of the project, and items that were high priority. I thought this was a really sensible idea, but the Project Manager told me he wasn’t allowed to do it. Project Support had told him that the company standard was to use a word-processor table and not a spreadsheet and that he must comply. Project Support staff had gone off track with documentation standards and were now applying an unnecessary limitation even though it worked against good project management.

Keeping the Documentation Down

PRINCE2 users often complain that the method is paper-hungry and involves lots of unnecessary documentation. That’s actually not true. If a document is unnecessary, why is it being produced? Why isn’t the project’s audit function – Project Assurance (please see Chapter 12 for more information) – jumping up and down and questioning why valuable project time is being taken up in writing this document that isn’t needed, and then creating more unnecessary work for others who now have to read it?

You must make sure that you need every document that you produce in your project and that the content included is all necessary too. And even if the content is right, you need to ensure that the way you communicate it is appropriate. For example, do you really need to write that information down? Can you use a phone call instead?

Use the Communication Management Strategy in the Project Initiation Document (PID) to think through and record exactly what you require and the most effective and efficient way of communicating the information. Please see Chapter 5 for more on the strategies and PID.

Making PRINCE2 a Standard

So simple? Well yes, almost. PRINCE2 needs to become ‘the way we do things around here’ – part of the organisational culture, not an optional add-on. As with anything else, people gain familiarity and best practice becomes ingrained. ‘Lessons learned’ from one project feed forward into future projects.

Be careful that you don’t fall into the trap of the standard approach where people think you use PRINCE2 exactly the same way on every project. Instead, the familiarity and experience can lead to ever-improving and ever more intelligent use of the method.

Insisting on PRINCE2

Insisting that PRINCE2 is used? You may be thinking, ‘Hmmm. Easier said than done in my organisation.’ You need to get senior corporate management on board to make sure that you use PRINCE2 for all your projects. Now you’re probably thinking, ‘You really don’t know my organisation.’ I agree that getting top management support can be tricky – but not tricky with accounting. I expect that your organisation’s finance staff prepared the accounts properly and professionally last year and are preparing them equally properly and professionally this year. And I don’t anticipate any arguments about whether the finance staff will prepare the accounts properly next year either. Managing accounts professionally and well is routine and indeed necessary.

In the same way, the organisation needs to be as determined and as professional with managing its projects every single time. This needs top management support to work well – but not unknowing, mindless support. Senior managers need to see the logic of PRINCE2 and appreciate the business impact of failure where projects aren’t run well. That business impact applies whether the organisation is public or private.

Training People in PRINCE2

I’m not trying to sell training here – organisations can do some training in-house. But whichever way you choose, all the people involved in the project need to understand the method they work with. And don’t forget the Project Board, the senior management group with oversight of the project (Chapter 12 covers the detail). Board members can’t fulfil their function of making sure that the project runs properly if they don’t understand the method, any more than senior managers of a department can check whether the department functions well if they don’t have any idea what their staff do.

The project board is actually a big failure point for PRINCE2. A lot of project problems can be traced back to the board not doing its job properly. The project is like a department or even a whole organisation. If you have problems in the board room, you usually have problems in the company. As far as you can control or influence your organisation’s use of PRINCE2, try to make sure that you don’t have problems of ignorance in your project ‘board room’. Make sure that your people know what they’re doing.

Implementing Project Assurance

Some people think that you do financial audit as a matter of routine but that project audit (Project Assurance) is somehow optional and unnecessary. But this is a strange and rather contradictory approach, especially given that some projects are incredibly important.

Project Assurance is essential, but it’s also really helpful. It’s essential because you must check that things are correct; it’s helpful because Project Assurance supports the Project Manager. Project Assurance is like having a colleague check something over for you – a colleague who’s sensible, co-operative, and constructive, not nit-picking and awkward.

Project Assurance is a valuable PRINCE2 safeguard and is an essential part of the way the method works. Don’t leave it out. Instead, implement Project Assurance properly and everyone’s happy, including those being audited.

Actually Doing the Benefit Reviews

The Business Case for the project sets down how you will measure the benefits and the Benefits Review Plan describes who does this and when. The project and the organisation need to make sure that the reviews happen partly by Project Board Members and senior organisational managers making sure that they get the results. For more on the Business Case and Benefits Review Plan, please see Chapter 11. For more on the Project Board’s Project Assurance responsibilities and the external organisational check of Quality Assurance please see Chapter 12.

You need to be particularly careful about any benefits reviews that are planned for after the end of the project. At the end of the project, the PRINCE2 Project Management Team is disbanded, so you need to be sure that the responsibility for post-project benefit reviews is passed to someone in the organisation who’ll make quite sure that they happen and that the results are reported.

Maintaining Product Planning

Product-based – or product-led – planning is a very powerful approach that PRINCE2 assumes you’ll be using. Many users misunderstand product planning and so leave it out, thereby missing out on an extremely valuable planning approach that feeds forward into progress and quality control. At this point, depending on when you read this, you may be thinking any of the following:

If you read Chapter 14 in this book, which deals with planning, you may be thinking, ‘Oh no, he’s raving on about the benefits of product planning again!’

If you haven’t read Chapter 14 but have already used PRINCE2, you may be thinking, ‘Oh yes, product-based planning; I never did get the point of all that.’

And if you’re completely new to PRINCE2, you may be thinking: ‘Whatever’s product planning? Surely we don’t need more planning techniques in projects?’

Whichever applies to you, do get to grips with this planning approach and then use it – it really does help. Product planning is a bit awkward at first because it isn’t a natural way of thinking, but is actually very logical, so persevere. In the end it becomes easy. Product planning is a great step forward that pays its way time and again and can really help you, so don’t leave it out.

Using the Product Checklist

The Product Checklist is a superb progress-monitoring tool and is much more effective than the normal ‘percentage complete’ progress check based on activities. This is because the checklist is factual and unambiguous. The Product Checklist emerges naturally from product planning, as Chapter 14 explains. The products you deliver in each stage act as milestones – the Product Checklist simply shows whether a product is complete (which means quality checked and signed off) or not. With 15 to 30 products in each stage, there are 15 to 30 points where the Project Manager and Project Board know exactly where the project is, with no debate at all. That’s more than useful.

Keeping the Plans Up To Date

The PRINCE2 method has three levels of planning – but the thing about plans is that you need to keep them up to date. Too many people in projects draw up a plan to get the funding at the beginning, and then put the plan in a drawer and forget all about planning until the start of the next project. But a plan is only useful if it’s up to date. This takes effort, but is vital for control.

The ongoing planning work involves making forward projections so that you can see any problems coming and take action in good time. For example, imagine that you’re driving a car and you see a brick wall in the distance. You have time to steer to avoid the wall. But if you only look up and see the wall filling the whole windscreen at the last minute, no matter how violently you steer, you crash. Project Assurance should check at intervals to ensure that plans are up to date as well.

Plans are essential for effective control. No up-to-date plans – nothing to measure against – means no effective control.