Practices: the seven management disciplines
What you must know
PRINCE2 has seven practices: business case, organizing, plans, quality, risk, issues and progress. Each is described by its purpose, its key concepts, the roles involved, the products it creates and how it can be tailored.
- Business case: outputs, outcomes and benefits (plus dis-benefits); justification is reviewed at every stage boundary and whenever a change or exception arises.
- Plans: three levels - project, stage and team - plus exception plans. Plans use product-based planning: product breakdown structure, product descriptions, then a product flow diagram.
- Quality: quality planning (what is required) versus quality control (checking it has been achieved); techniques include quality review, and records include the quality register and acceptance records.
- Risk: cause → event → effect; risk appetite versus risk tolerance; risk management approach and risk register.
- Issues: types of issue, change control approach, issue register and change authority.
- Progress: management stages, tolerances and reports - checkpoint, highlight, end stage and end project - plus lessons.
Traps in questions
- Mixing up the registers (quality, risk, issue) and the logs (lessons). Registers track live items needing action; the lessons log is a continuing record of lessons, which feeds the lessons report at closure.
- Confusing the quality register (planned and completed quality activities) with a product description (the product's quality criteria).
- Forgetting that each practice's approach (risk, quality, change control) is baselined in the project initiation documentation.
Rule of thumb
Ask 'is this planning the requirement or controlling against it?' - planning sits in approaches and product descriptions, control sits in registers and reports.