The web team attended a three day training course run by the Knowledge Academy which was held in Cardiff Bay, the three days were quite intense, there was so much to learn packed into each day, plus several hours of homework to do each night. On the third day there is an exam for the PRINCE 2 foundation course in which luckily we all passed :), some of our fellow learners were doing the five day practitioner course which has two extra days and another exam.
PRINCE 2 is basically a framework for managing projects, it was originally developed from an IT background and is now identified as a best practice by the UK Government and widely used in both the public and private sector.
Going through the framework you quickly identify things that you already do when running web development projects, things like Change Control, keeping a daily log, and lots of other common sense practices. PRINCE 2 gives you a full and rich framework for managing a project, and importantly the processes and controls to manage change. How often do web professionals get caught by feature creep, never ending additional request for new features or change to spec? Normally you can expect a fair amount of this, so PRINCE2 gives you the weapons to handle these with concepts like Scope and Configuration Management.
Some of the advantages that really stood out for me were :
- The methodology gives you a well defined common language set that can be used when discussing projects, if you talk to someone else on a project who has done PRINCE2 whether it’s an external supplier or someone in your organisation they will know what you are referring to and understand the context and implications.
- In PRINCE2 responsibilities and roles within the project are well defined and understood. You can avoid having large working groups or committees where the purpose and roles within it are not clear.
- Most meetings only occur when required at stages in the project when decisions are to be made, rather organising them periodically when there may be nothing to discuss.
- PRINCE2 puts an emphasis on Business Case and ongoing business Justification, these are defined and monitored through the project, and can help avoid project continuing for the sake of it. PRINCE2 asserts that it’s valid for a project to close if the business case no longer holds up. If people involved in the project have to define formally what the project is to deliver and the benefits to the business, it’s much easier for those producing the solutions to deliver something that meets expectations and for everyone to measure the project’s success.
PRINCE2 consists of Principles, Themes, Processes and tailoring. I won’t go into details but I think it’s worth mentioning the Seven Principles of PRINCE2 to give you a taste of what it can offer. They are :
- Continued Business Justification
- Learn from experience
- Defined roles and responsibilities
- Manage by stages
- Manage by exception
- Focus on products
- Tailor to suit the project environment
Lastly I’d just like to mention Tailoring which is a big part of PRINCE2. Going through the course and covering all aspects of the framework you will undoubtedly come across parts that will be too in depth or not required for most projects you might be running. PRINCE2 allows you to tailor how you implement the framework to suit the scale and formality you require. Some parts of PRINCE2 have to be used otherwise the project cannot be said to be running under PRINCE2 but other parts can be made less formal or dropped altogether. If you are working in Higher Education JISC have developed a version of PRINCE2 that may suit you. This was the basis (with some tweaks) to how our web team project manage large web development tasks.
JISC Infonet
PRINCE Official Website
Good luck,
Joss
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