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PRINCE2 2009 - Tailoring PRINCE2 part 36

Tailoring PRINCE2 to the project environment

Project type

Lifecycle models

Many industries or professions have developed lifecycle models for particular types of projects, such as waterfall or agile methods.


PRINCE2® works well with such models as they primarily focus on the activities to create and verify the project’s specialist products - the aspect of projects that PRINCE2 deliberately does not address.

Tailoring PRINCE2 to work with specialist lifecycle models principally involves:

  • Aligning the management stages to the development lifecycle - e.g. design, build, test, transition
  • Using tolerances to match the development focus - e.g. agile projects that use an iterative and incremental approach tend to fix timescale and quality (narrow tolerance) and vary scope (wide tolerance)
  • Integrating any specialist roles into the project management team structure. For example, if the lifecycle model includes a technical design authority, should this role be a peer of the Project Manager, a Team Manager who reports to the Project Manager, or a form of Project Assurance? As roles are simply a collection of responsibilities, it is not that important what the role is called, but it is important that the responsibilities defined by the roles are assigned to someone within the organization - and that the assignment is clearly understood by all those people involved
  • Using PRINCE2 for the project management products (e.g. Project Brief) and using the specialist method to define the purpose, format, composition and quality criteria for the specialist management products (e.g. the solution architecture definition in DSDM Atern). Specialist methods may also provide some project management products, so it is important to identify which of its management products are to help the creation of the specialist products (e.g. a technical design document), and which are to help manage the project. For each of its project management products, a decision should be made as to whether to use the PRINCE2 equivalent or not. The goal is to avoid duplication or gaps
  • Providing hooks from the Managing Product Delivery process to the specialist product development processes

PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.

This product contains EVERYTHING in the publications:

Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 - 2005 edition
Managing successful Projects with PRINCE2 – 2009 edition
Directing Projects with PRINCE2.
plus:
The Complete Project Management package.

And much more besides - at a fantastic price.