My thoughts on PRINCE2

- Now, in the world of project management there is a little bit of a battle going on at the moment because there are three different methodologies, three processes, or philosophies that you can use to run a project. And these three methods are fighting it out. And different people prefer different ones. I do actually have a favorite. But there are pros and cons with all of them. So, the first one I want to talk about is PRINCE. It's usually called Prince2, now. PRINCE stands for Projects In Controlled Environments. But you don't need to know that, it's just known as Prince2. The reason for the two is that originally Prince was for IT projects, and then they broadened out to cover all projects and they called it Prince2. So, Prince2 came along at about 1985. There were a couple of high-profile IT systems that were disasters. It was a public sector system. I think it was the NHS or something like that, and the British government decided to bring in a methodology, and they brought in Prince, which later became Prince2. So, it's really for big, complicated public sector infrastructure type projects. And I think if you're building a nuclear power station or something like that, then I think Prince is a good idea. Prince is basically a control system. So, the objective of Prince is to stop you starting a project you shouldn't start, and to make sure that you've got a really good plan before you start. And I'm all in favor of that. You know in any organization, particularly a large and more complicated organization, you don't want lots of people just starting projects that might overlap or conflict. So, the idea is you have to put in a mandate or a project brief to say, "I would like to do this project, please, can I?" And then as you go through the stages, we say, called Gateways, you have to get permission to go to the next bit. And I think in some cases that's great. I definitely would like a system that said, you can't start a project unless you've got a decent plan, and I want to see it before you start. So, that's the good side of Prince. It's a high level control system. The problem with Prince, I think there are two problems really, one is it's a little bit complicated, just Google Image Prince and have a look and you'll see it is complicated. Now, you can pick and choose which bits you want to use, but I think that's a little bit messy because how do you know which bits to use, and what if you don't use enough, or you don't use the right bits? So, I think it, I would like something neat and tidy where you just do the system. So Prince is a little bit complicated. The other problem with Prince is that it doesn't tell you how to do anything. So Prince says you've got to have a project plan, what's in it's up to you. You've got to monitor the cost, how you do it's up to you. So Prince's attitude is as long as you're doing all the right bits, that's great. But it doesn't tell you how. It's just a framework. And that's fine because as long as you know how to do those things and they get done, that's great, but, if you're looking to be told how to run a project, then Prince won't actually do that for you. It's just a high-level control framework. So you'll need to do the APM process, if you want to know how to actually run a project. The APM process is what I prefer. I'm going to come to that later. But the point I wanted to make really, is they don't conflict at all. You can absolutely use the APM way to run your projects, and you can use Prince as a control system above. So that's a quick outline of Prince.