Agile Delivery within a PRINCE2 Project: AgileSHAPE, Focus Areas and Health Checks
What you must understand
This domain tests integration. AgileSHAPE is the tailoring guide that helps you decide how to apply agile within PRINCE2: it covers Start, How, Apply, Process, Evaluate - a cycle for adopting agile practices proportionate to context.
The focus areas are the lenses you examine when tailoring: agile behaviours, agile concepts, agile techniques, the PRINCE2 principles, the PRINCE2 themes, and the PRINCE2 processes. Questions often ask which focus area a given concern belongs to.
Health checks are the diagnostic tool: they assess how healthy the project's agile application is across the focus areas, producing a red/amber/green view and recommended actions. They are not audits and do not replace stage boundary reviews.
Traps
- Treating AgileSHAPE as a delivery method rather than a tailoring guide.
- Confusing a health check (diagnostic, improvement-focused) with a stage boundary (governance decision point).
- Assuming health checks are done once. They are repeated to track improvement.
- Mixing up focus areas with AgileSHAPE stages.
Rule of thumb
If the scenario asks 'how do we know if our agile adoption is working?', the answer is a health check. If it asks 'how do we decide what to tailor?', the answer is AgileSHAPE.
Worked example
A programme wants assurance that a project's agile practices are effective mid-stage. Correct action: run a health check across the focus areas, report findings to the project board, and feed actions into the next retrospective - while keeping the stage boundary as the formal decision point.