Chapter 3

Getting Real Power from PRINCE2

In This Chapter

Knowing that PRINCE2 isn’t a standard approach to projects

Understanding why some people hit problems with PRINCE2

Adjusting the method to fit exact project needs

PRINCE2 is a really logical and helpful way of planning and controlling projects. This chapter shows you how to get the true power out of the method, adjust it to fit real-life project situations, and avoid the problems that come from poor understanding and inflexible application of PRINCE2.

This chapter is ideal for you to dip in and out of. You may want to have a look at the chapter early to get some idea about the flexibility of the method, and perhaps discover the cause of any problems you’ve heard about when other people have been using PRINCE2. Indeed, you may have flicked to this chapter first and even now be standing in a bookshop wondering if PRINCE2 For Dummies can give you answers to problems like that. It can. After you’ve read other parts of the book and seen how everything fits together, you can come back to this chapter and think these things over in a bit more detail.

Understanding the method well and then using it intelligently is very important. In that sense, PRINCE2 is like most tools: If you don’t know how to use the tool, you may well end up causing some damage to yourself and other people too.

Understanding the Problems

Two misunderstandings are at the root of most poor uses of the method: That PRINCE2 is a standard approach to projects and that PRINCE2 is merely a method for documenting projects:

PRINCE2 can’t be a standard approach: PRINCE2 can’t be a standard approach to planning and controlling projects for one simple but overriding reason: projects themselves are not standard. They vary enormously from very small, low-risk, very simple projects to huge, business-critical, high-risk, very complex projects. Thinking that you need to plan and control all projects in the same way is highly illogical, as well as dangerously simplistic.

Projects vary enormously and so your personal applications of PRINCE2 may be very different depending on the projects you’re working on. The really good news is that you can adjust your use of PRINCE2, and quite dramatically so. The method has been built for flexibility and you can adjust almost everything in it to fit the needs of individual projects. Indeed, that’s one of its great strengths.

The PRINCE2 manual mentions a few limits on its adaptability, though not many. But in this book – particularly in this chapter – I show how you can exceed some of these limits to make PRINCE2 more widely applicable than the manual suggests.

PRINCE2 is not a documentation method: Not much more to say here – other than that people thinking PRINCE2 is just about filling forms in is extremely sad because they are missing out; big time. In fact PRINCE2 is an active and powerful method that really helps you get the job done.

As I write this update to PRINCE2 For Dummies to reflect the changes in the 2009 edition of PRINCE2, a project management organisation is planning a debate. The debate is to be held at a major UK university and is to discuss the problem that PRINCE2 has so much documentation. This demonstrates the degree (no pun intended) to which PRINCE2 is being misunderstood and mis-applied. It’s being taught as a documentation method and then applied as a documentation method. Follow this book to see how you can apply the method intelligently without excessive paperwork. And while we’re on the subject, do beware of any not-so-good Project Offices that idolise their filing formats and documents and push you down the path of excessive documentation in the name of ‘standardisation’.

When thinking about how to ‘tailor’ PRINCE2 to fit the project, a lot of people look at the whole of the method in all its detail and try to work out which bits they can chip off. But usually it’s better and easier if you begin at the other end. Start with a simple implementation of PRINCE2 and justify any complexity. Remember that every bit of project overhead costs money and it also costs time, so be sure you need it. On the one hand don’t skimp on necessary and sensible planning and control, but on the other hand don’t do things on your project just because they’re in the PRINCE2 manual. In short, keep your brain in gear.

Remembering that PRINCE2 Is a Tool

Some of the strange and even funny things people say about PRINCE2 illustrate the wrong concepts they hold. I mention some of them here because it helps you see what the method isn’t, and understand more how it can help you.

I have enough to do on the project already without having to do all this PRINCE2 stuff as well.

This shows a misunderstanding of the ‘tool’ nature of PRINCE2. The method becomes the way in which you plan and control projects, not some additional bolt-on work. You’d be surprised to hear a carpenter say, ‘Oh, no. As well as building a table, now I have to use a mallet and chisel as well.’ Using the mallet and chisel makes it easier to build the table; like PRINCE2, they are tools that help get the job done well and more easily.

PRINCE2 doesn’t really fit my project.

This takes us back to the wrong idea of a ‘standard approach’ where an organisation tries to have a fixed use of PRINCE2 across all its projects. Managers fail to understand PRINCE2’s enormous flexibility to adjust to the needs of different projects in different project environments. Almost certainly, managers pay for this misunderstanding with excessive project overheads and probably with project delays.

Isn’t PRINCE2 bureaucratic? It makes you do all this stuff you don’t need.

Once again, the organisation doesn’t appreciate the flexibility of the method. If you don’t need something on a project, don’t do it. Things really are as easy as that. However, this doesn’t mean that Project Managers can start leaving out bits of PRINCE2 because they can’t be bothered to do them. The adjustment of the method comes under the full protection of the project auditing function known as Project Assurance, which you can find out about in Chapter 12.

I know this is stupid, but PRINCE2 made me do . . . and . . .

This stems from a failure to appreciate the need to fit the method to the project and also is a symptom of the ‘standard approach’ mentality. The short answer is: ‘If you know that something’s stupid, why are you doing it?’ PRINCE2 doesn’t ‘make’ anyone do anything – it’s a book and a book can’t jump off the desk, twist someone’s arm and force him to do something! People saying this reveal that they didn’t think through what they did – and didn’t – need and so are now using the method inappropriately.

We don’t have time to do PRINCE2 on this project.

Oh yes you do. You always have time to project manage, and actually the less time you have before delivery, the better the planning and control needs to be. If the delivery date of the project doesn’t much matter, then the plans and controls don’t need to be as tight. What this organisation is really saying is that its staff don’t know how to apply the method rapidly.

Principle 7 – Tailor to suit the project environment.

Getting the Power: Adjustment

I hope that you get the picture that PRINCE2 isn’t some strict, step-by-step approach to projects, but rather a powerful and dynamic method that really helps you plan and control projects better, faster and more easily. Here are some of the ways in which you can adjust the method to fit your project.

Leaving out activities

In Chapter 2, which discusses the structure of the method, I said that you can think of the activities within each PRINCE2 process as being like a checklist. This reminds you to think about everything, but it doesn’t mean that you have to do everything.

Here’s a simple analogy. Perhaps you have a standard shopping list that you use for a weekly shopping trip. The list includes a bag of flour, because usually you use one bag each week. However, last week you ate out a few times and other dishes didn’t use much flour, so you hardly used any of last week’s bag. Do you leave the flour on the list and go and buy another bag? No, of course not: You cross it off because you don’t need to buy flour this week.

The shopping example may be a simple one, and as an experienced project professional you may think that weekly grocery shopping is definitely something to delegate to someone else. But it shows exactly how you handle the activities in PRINCE2. If you don’t need an activity on this particular project, then don’t do it – or you may start to complain about the method not fitting the project or about excessive overheads.

A group of people I call the ‘List Tickers’ make this worse. The List Tickers go round projects insisting that absolutely everything is done so that they can tick the boxes on their standardised control sheets. I refer to List Tickers again later and I don’t like them any better in those places either. The point is that you have to think, not follow the manual blindly.

Beware of List Tickers – they can seriously damage both your patience and your project budget. But don’t confuse List Tickers with Project Assurance and Quality Assurance, both of which are genuinely helpful when performed properly.

Adjusting the degree to which you do activities

Although you don’t need to do every activity you’ll end up doing nearly all of them. So then you need to decide the degree to which you do an activity. For example, one of the activities that you use in the main part of the project is about checking progress. You obviously need to check progress, so you can’t leave it out altogether. But how much or how often do you check progress? That depends on the characteristics of the project. You may do a very detailed and exhaustive check with careful forward predictions twice a week. Or you may be happy with a fairly high-level check once a fortnight and that may be enough for a small and straightforward project.

Altering the sequence of activities within a PRINCE2 process

The process diagrams in PRINCE2 (shown in the chapters in Part II of the book) have arrows that show the order in which to do the activities. But this is a suggested sequence, not an imposed sequence. You may deliberately go against the direction of the arrows, and that’s absolutely fine.

The arrows between activities are a suggested sequence, not an imposed sequence.

For example, suppose that when you work on the Business Case in Start Up, it indicates that the project is certainly worth at least planning out in more detail. So the Initiation Stage is started to do exactly that. But you know that the benefits were difficult to assess accurately in Start Up and you think that when the more detailed work is done, the Business Case may fall apart. Well, in that case, you might well want to do that Business Case work first of all in the Initiation Stage, so if it’s going to collapse, it does so early on before you’ve wasted time on other planning work.

Taking that example and translating it into PRINCE2 activities, you’d actually be altering the PRINCE2 sequence as set down in the manual. The activities and the arrows between them show that you write strategies such as the Risk Management Strategy and plan the project, and only after that do you work up the Business Case into more detail. Going back to your preferred approach for this project though, you’re doing quite a bit of Business Case work before you do the strategies and the plan. If the Business Case still looks good when you’ve done the more detailed work, you then catch up with the strategies and other planning and make any final tweaks to the Business Case after that. You’re going against the flow of the arrows in the process diagram but that’s completely justifiable and sensible in this case.

The acid test for any adjustment of PRINCE2 to the project is always to ask: ‘Is this sensible change for this project?’ If the adjustment is better for the project than the default in the PRINCE2 manual, then it’s a good one.

Shifting activities between processes

Many PRINCE2 practitioners must have ‘done time’ in prison I think (perhaps some dodgy projects) because they seem to think of the processes as prison cells from which activities mustn’t be allowed to escape. However, in some circumstances you may want to move activities (or bits of them) from one process to another. This may send the List Tickers into apoplexy, but if it’s sensible, do it.

An example is with making appointments to project roles in Start Up. The normal PRINCE2 way is to appoint the main project board role, the Executive, and then the Project Manager. When they’re in place, the rest of the Project Management Team is designed and the people are appointed. This means explaining their roles to them and making adjustments if they aren’t happy.

Suppose, though, that you need to go really fast in Start Up. In fact, the Executive and Project Manager need to do Start Up in just two hours. At the end of this time, the Executive will decide whether or not to take things forward, start the project and authorise the full project planning with an Initiation Stage. In that two hours, the Executive and Project Manager must scope the project, look at likely risks, build a Business Case and see if the project looks as if it’ll be justified. In those two hours they won’t also have time to decide on other appointments, call those people in, brief them and make any adjustments to the roles if people aren’t happy. In ‘real life’ the other appointments would be left until later and done while the planning is going on in the Initiation Stage.

Translating that into activities, the start up work of designing and appointing the Project Management Team is taken out of the primary process ‘Starting Up a Project’ and moved into the process ‘Initiating a Project’.

You may also want to delay appointments for other reasons, such as you’re not sure who the right people are until the Project Brief is agreed. Delaying these appointments is not uncommon and can be very sensible.

Using PRINCE2 in a hurry – parallel initiation

Some people argue that they need to move fast to meet a short end date and so don’t have time to do Project Initiation. This is a poor argument, because proceeding without the sensible plans and controls that Initiation puts in place is dangerous. But if you really are under pressure, you can often speed up the front end of the project without losing the power of PRINCE2. The early work of the project can be very predictable and often you can run it with a very simple plan. If that’s the case, you can simply overlap the Initiation Stage with the front part of the first specialist stage of the project.

This doesn’t mean that you leave the Initiation Stage out, just that its work proceeds in parallel with the front part of the first delivery stage. Using parallel initiation is the only time in PRINCE2 that you consider overlapping management stages. When you produce the Project Initiation Document (PID) at the end of Initiation, if the Project Board decides that the project is not worth doing after all, then you’ve wasted the specialist work that was done in parallel. Is that acceptable? Well yes, probably, because in such extreme circumstances if you don’t overlap the two, then you won’t ever manage to do the project at all.

But this overlap is still bad news, so try hard not to do it. You’re much, much better off running the Initiation Stage rapidly, making a decision using the PID on whether to commit, and then moving promptly on to the specialist stages. Overlapping really is a last resort for when you need to move very quickly indeed, so don’t make it routine.

Running the project without a project plan, just stage plans

PRINCE2 does have some boundaries, but you can break these and the method is actually rather better than the official manual indicates. The manual says that of the three levels of planning detail – project, stage and team – only the Team Plan level is optional. The idea sitting behind this is that in many projects the Stage Plan carries enough detail for Team Managers to control their work assignments or Work Packages.

Logically though, the Stage Plan cannot be mandatory. If you have a very small project with only one delivery stage, then the Stage Plan and the Project Plan are the same thing and you only need the Project Plan.

But going further than this, the method indicates that you must always have a Project Plan that runs from the end of the Initiation Stage until the end of the project. But what if you don’t know what the end of the project is? To take an extreme example, what if you can only see as far ahead as the first delivery stage? The answer is not to regard each stage as a separate project – that’s a sure way to massively drive up overheads. The answer is to challenge the PRINCE2 assumption about having to have a Project Plan.

An example here is with research projects. Say you’re doing research on a major disease. Can you tell me when you’re going to find a cure because I want to write the date in my diary? Clearly, life just isn’t like that. You often can’t see too far and you certainly aren’t able to see up until the end of the project. But most research projects have stages. So you can plan and resource the first block of research, and at the end of that stage things are clearer and you can plan and resource the next stage. So the staged approach of PRINCE2 fits most research projects very well but you don’t have a Project Plan. You have a succession of stage plans, and you check the ongoing viability of the research before committing to each new stage.

Fitting PRINCE2 to the Project

The following panels go through a few of the environments you may encounter, together with some tailoring tips. This covers the major environments mentioned in the PRINCE2 manual. But in looking at the specific environments mentioned in the method, don’t forget the factors covered earlier in this chapter. Bearing those in mind, you can fit PRINCE2 to just about anything, not just the specific areas that follow.

The PRINCE2 manual suggests that the roles of Programme Manager could be integrated with Executive of projects. This isn’t usually a good idea. In a programme of any size, the Programme Manager is almost certainly a ‘project professional’ not a business manager, and focuses on the day-to-day co-ordination and management of the projects. The Executive role needs to see things from the point of view of the business and in the context of the business. However, you can consider integrating the roles of Programme Director (or Senior Responsible Owner) who isn’t so involved in the day-to-day detail with that of one or more Executive positions on the member projects. Those roles are more compatible as, like an Executive, the Programme Director focuses on the business.

The PRINCE2 manual suggests combining the processes ‘Starting Up a Project’ and ‘Initiating a Project’ in simple projects. This isn’t usually a sensible thing to do at all. Starting Up a Project can be done very rapidly and as argued in Chapter 4, Start Up is not only logically necessary but very advantageous, simple project or not. The circumstances where the processes may, unusually, be combined don’t relate to the simplicity or otherwise of the project but rather to things like the availability of information.

The PRINCE2 manual warns of the need for things like having two separate progress reports from each commercial supplier team. One to the project and one to their own company managers, which include things such as new business opportunities. However, don’t even start to get bogged down in all this. You needn’t concern yourself with the supplier’s internal communications and you certainly can’t start specifying them. Anyway, no commercial supplier is going to start telling you all their internal communication arrangements just so you can complete some strange and excessive project documentation!

Taking It Seriously: Being Professional

The last part of getting the power out of PRINCE2 concerns the people, which is what all projects come down to in the end. The organisation has to be as professional about managing its projects as it is about any other management activity.

Everyone involved needs to be professional in their outlook and not play ‘project games’. As part of this, the Project Board, the senior managers overseeing the project, must take their responsibilities seriously, just as a head of department takes managing the department seriously. They must also treat the audit function of the project, Project Assurance, as seriously as accounting functions take internal audits.

Organisations are often very professional in their mainstream work, but then act strangely when it comes to projects, as if somehow projects don’t represent a significant use of resources. Project management doesn’t have to be given a higher profile than any other branch of corporate management, but it does need to be taken as seriously and carried out conscientiously. Where projects fail, the impacts are business impacts. That alone signals that good project management is an important business matter, no matter if your business is private sector, public sector or third – charity.