Eight Stages for a Four-Month Statutory Delivery
Northgate Council must implement a new statutory waste-reporting system within four months; the date is fixed by legislation. The project has six full-time staff, an off-the-shelf product from a single supplier, and requirements identical to two implementations the council completed last year. The programme office has nonetheless mandated a full PRINCE2 environment: eight management stages, a monthly project board, a stage plan for every two weeks, and a document set of 40 management products. The project manager estimates 40% of her time now goes on administration. The business case was approved eleven months ago and has not been revisited; the officer named as benefits owner left the council two months ago.
1. The programme office argues that 'PRINCE2 is PRINCE2' and that reducing the number of stages and products would make the project non-compliant. Evaluate this argument and state what the project manager should do.
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The programme office is wrong in principle. PRINCE2 must be tailored to suit the project environment - the seven principles must be applied, but the processes, practices and management products are adapted or reduced to fit scale, risk and familiarity. This is a four-month, six-person, low-uncertainty deployment of a known product; eight stages, fortnightly stage plans and 40 products buy control the project cannot use and cannot afford, and the 40% administration figure is the symptom.
What the project manager should do:
- Prepare a short tailoring proposal: two or three management stages aligned to real decision points (statutory milestones, supplier gateways), board reporting merged with the existing programme board, and full product descriptions only where quality is genuinely at risk (data migration runbook, acceptance testing).
- Show explicitly how each principle is still met after tailoring - particularly defined roles and responsibilities, manage by stages and manage by exception.
- Record the tailoring decisions and rationale in the project initiation documentation and get the project board, not the programme office, to approve them, because the board owns the project's controls.
Judgement point: 'the programme office mandated it' is not a defensible reason for applying unusable controls - but tailoring must be agreed and documented, not silently ignored.
2. Which principle is most threatened by the untouched business case, and what specifically must happen before the next stage boundary?
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The principle at risk is continued business justification: a PRINCE2 project must have a justified business case that is reviewed and, where necessary, updated at every stage boundary, and the project should be stopped if justification is lost.
Evidence that the principle is already failing: eleven months without review, and the loss of the benefits owner means nobody currently owns the 12%-style benefit claims or can validate them. A business case whose benefits are unowned is an assumption, not a justification.
Before the stage boundary the project manager must:
- Arrange for a new benefits owner / senior user to be appointed and named in the business case - this is a board appointment, not a project manager decision.
- Re-validate benefits with that person, and re-check costs, timescales and major risks against the current plan.
- Update the business case as part of Managing a Stage Boundary, and present it with the end stage report so the board can decide to continue, change or stop.
The judgement to demonstrate: the board is being asked to re-justify the project, not merely to rubber-stamp a document written nearly a year ago.
3. The project manager proposes to run the whole remaining project as a single delivery stage to cut administration further. Assess this proposal.
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This goes too far. Manage by stages is a principle, not a tailorable option: a PRINCE2 project must have at least two management stages - an initiation stage and at least one further delivery stage - and the project board must have review, direction and authorisation points between them.
A single stage would mean:
- the board never reviews progress against a stage plan before work continues;
- there is no end stage report, no updated business case and no re-authorisation partway through;
- tolerances are delegated once and never revisited, so manage by exception has no landing point either.
A defensible compromise: run the remaining work as two delivery stages split at a genuine decision point - for example, after data migration rehearsal and before go-live cutover, when the board genuinely could stop or defer. That cuts the eight-stage burden while preserving the control the principle requires. If the project manager wants fewer stages, she must show where the board will still take meaningful continue/stop decisions.