Tailoring PRINCE2 Principles, Themes and Processes to Agile Delivery
What you must understand
Tailoring is the heart of the Practitioner exam. Principles are never tailored. Themes are tailored in how they are applied: the business case is reviewed continuously and uses agile investment appraisal; organisation defines roles (Project Board, Project Manager, Team Manager) and maps them to agile roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, delivery team); quality uses acceptance criteria, definition of done and frequent review; plans use timeboxes, levels of plan and rolling-wave planning; risk uses the risk management approach with agile-specific responses; change uses the change budget and prioritised backlogs; progress uses burn charts, radars and frequent demos.
Processes are tailored too: Starting up a Project and Initiating a Project still produce the PID (lightweight); Managing a Stage Boundary becomes a lightweight review; Controlling a Stage uses work packages, daily stand-ups and tolerance checks; Managing Product Delivery uses timeboxes and team boards; Closing a Project uses the final retrospective and benefits review.
Traps
- Tailoring a principle - always wrong.
- Forgetting that a work package remains the PRINCE2 control mechanism even in agile delivery.
- Assuming the PID disappears. It is tailored, not removed.
- Confusing the change budget (delegated tolerance for change) with the project budget.
Rule of thumb
If the question asks 'what is tailored?', check whether the answer names a theme or process product/practice. If it names a principle, reject it.