Process

When the idea of a project has been mooted and before we make sure it’s a good idea to run it, we’d run the starting up a project process. This process appoints the Executive, Project Manager, and a few other key team members. They create a few artifacts, which are mostly packaged in a key artifact called the project brief. This contains information about the reason for doing the project, its justification (an outline of the business case), the approach to creating the output, etc.

The Executive and possibly other people in the higher levels of the organization will review the project brief to see whether or not it’s a good idea to run the project. If it is, they would allow the project to proceed to the next process, which is the initiating a project process.

The team spends more time on initiation and creates a complete, yet high-level plan for the project. Most of the findings during this process will be packaged in an artifact called the project initiation documentation, sometimes abbreviated as PID. It contains more precise estimates for time, cost, scope, and other targets, as well as a business case that’s refined based on this information and gives us a more reliable picture of the justification of the project.

The project initiation documentation will be sent to the Executive and possibly other decision makers, and this time, they make a final decision whether or not to start executing the project.

As you can see, the decision for executing the project is made in two steps: first a quick, rough study to exclude ideas that are in no way justifiable, and then a longer (more expensive) one to make sure they really are justifiable.

PRINCE2^® projects are run one stage at a time. Before each stage, the managing a stage boundary process will be run to revise the high-level plan and create a detailed plan for the upcoming stage. The business case will be revised based on the new information and everything will be sent to the Executive to decide whether or not to continue with the project. All high-level decisions of the Executive are made in a process called directing a project.

During each stage, the controlling a stage process manages the day-to-day work by handing over work plans to Team Leaders and receiving back completed deliverables. There’s also a managing product delivery process in the delivery layer, run by Team Leaders, which interacts with the controlling a stage process run in the management layer.

The controlling a stage process also measures progress, issues reports, and looks for deviations. When a deviation is found, if it’s within the decision-making threshold of the project manager, the project manager is expected either to decide how to recover from it or otherwise to escalate it to the higher level and wait for them to decide.

When the project loses justification or when everything is finished, we move to the closing a project process, where we tie up the loose ends, hand over the product, and close it.