Aspects of Prince 2: Project IN Controlled Environment - Report Example

PRINCE2 Themes PRINCE2 (Project IN Controlled Environment) is a project management standard used in more than 150 countries for successfully managinga project. PRINCE2 consists of a several themes, set of principals, and a project management lifecycle. There are seven (7) themes of the PRINCE2 include: Risk, Change, Progress, Business Case, Organization, Quality and Plans. These themes of the PRINCE2 explain the significant project management aspects which need to be managed and handled during the execution of the project lifecycle (Weese, 2010). One of the other important project management standards is a Project Management Institute (PMI) that offers multiple certifications related to project management include: Project Management Professionals (PMP), Program Management Professional (PgMP) etc. (PMI, 2013). This document presents a comparison of the Plan PRINCE2 theme with other standards of the project management having relevant (particularly Planning) principals and techniques. In the last section of the document provides an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of using PRINCE2 theme in comparison to the other project management standards. In PRINCE2 a plan is not just about the cost management, schedule management and resources management, however, plans are set of documents explaining what to be achieved, how to be achieved and when to be achieved by whom the goals of a project. The PRINCE2 utilizes product planning technique for creating diverse types of plans. The product-based planning is used by the PRINCE2 which is one of the most powerful techniques for project managers to manage a project. The PRINCE2 recommends and uses different levels of the plan involve diverse human resources for managing the project successfully. These plans include: the project plan, stage plan(s) and team plan(s). As the PRINCE2 utilizes product-based planning having seven steps for creating or developing plans include: the design the plan, define and analyse the products, identify activities and dependencies, prepare estimates, prepare schedules and document the plan. In parallel to these steps the PRINCE2 always recommends reviewing the steps (for developing the plans) in order to identify the risks in the product, activities, estimates and schedule. The following diagram shows the steps involved in developing the plans (Hinde, 2012). Figure 1. The PRINCE2 Approach to Plans The Product-Based technique describes the Project Product Description, Product Breakdown Structure, and Product Flow Diagram. The Project Product Description entitles the products to be developed in the project including the customer requirements having quality expectations as well as the project acceptance criteria. The Product Flow Diagram shows the association between the products to be developed in the project. The Product Breakdown Structure categorises the diverse types of the products to be developed in the project. The Product Breakdown Structure (PBS) is specifically used in PRINCE2 project management standard PRINCE2 and it is a graphical representation tool used to define the clear and precise deliverables or outcomes of a project. In PBS, the whole project has to be a breakdown in a tree structure to define the products and the tasks that are required to develop a product. It is pertinent to mention here that the term ‘product’ can be an intermediate document, requirement specification document, user accepting testing documentation and so on. The PBS starts with a representation of the top level products of the project, sub-deliverables along with their components required to achieve the product and sub-divided into smaller project units. The PBS is specifically used for large projects having a huge number of products or project deliverables so that any deliverable of the project could not be ignored along with the activities required to achieve the deliverable (Trainer, 2010). By utilizing the Product-Based technique, the PRINCE2 develops three levels of plans include: the project plan, stage plan and team plan. The project plan is developed as a deliverable of the ‘Initiating a Project’ process. The lifecycle of the project plan revolves around all the phases / processes of the PRINCE2 recommends to update the project plan at each stage. The project plan is updated as per the progress of the project and provides information regarding the stage and subsequent stages. The stage plan focuses on managing the particular stage of the PRINCE2. It entitles the tasks and activities as well as the human resources required to complete the stage. The information contained by each work package involved in the particular stage include: the products to be produced and development of products (Beuhring, 2011). In comparison to the PRINCE2 technique, a Gantt chart is one of the imperative project management tools and has become an industry standard to determine the schedule of the project by showing phases, milestones, activities and resources (equipment, human, financial, etc.). There are four characteristics of the Gantt chart include: the activities have to organize from top to bottom, time is placed / determined from left to right, the relationship between the activities (start to start, start to finish, finish to start, finish to finish), and one of important elements is the identification of the critical path. The activities included in the critical path are said to be critical activities and if one of these activities delays, the whole duration of the project would be impacted accordingly. The critical activities are highlighted (usually with red colour) and representing the longest path of the project. Microsoft Project (MSP) is usually used to develop the Gantt chart (Gardiner, 2005, 252). Moreover, the work breakdown structure (WBS) is a hierarchical decomposition of the work that is required to be completed by the project team in order to achieve the project objectives. There are various benefits of using the WBS by the project manager that include but not limited to determining the scope of the project, the assigning human resources to the deliverables, monitoring of the project deliverables, it allows managing accurately the cost, time and risks of the project. Furthermore, while developing WBS it should be kept in mind that the micro-level work packages should not be represented as it would be difficult to manage for the project manager, it is required to only mention the deliverables rather activities and the WBS cannot replace the Gantt chart (Mathis, 2011). The logic network project management tool emphasizes on sequencing the activities of the project to determine the project duration. The project manager needs to identify the activities, the predecessors and successor relationship of the activities, the duration of each activity, the forward and backward pass, the activity float (or slack) and ultimately determining the critical path of the project by identifying the longest project path. The major difference between the Gantt chart and logic network diagrams that the Gantt chart highlights the project timeline and suitable for assigning the resources, whereas, the logic network diagrams accentuate the activities’ relationship and determining the float and suitable for project crashing (in order to reduce the project duration by assigning more human resources). The activities having zero (0) float are said to be critical activities which cannot be delayed in order to complete the project within specified duration (Gardiner, 2005). Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) chart is a project management tool that lays emphasis on the project schedule and manages project activities and milestones. The PERT chart is the graphical illustration of the critical path method or analysis (CPM or CPA). There are three (3) basic elements of the PERT chart that include: the events or milestones (completion of any or set of considerable activities – for example forms, templates, questionnaire etc.), the activities require achieving the milestones and/or objectives, and non-activities that are dependent on other activities (usually represented by dotted lines in the diagram). There are several advantages of using PERT chart that includes: easy to review the sequence of project events, project’s critical path, earliest start and finish time of each activity. Comparatively, the principals, techniques and processes of the PRINCE2 for developing diverse plans are comprehensive. Whereas, the Project Management Professional or other project management tools for planning the project provides the similar functionalities but using different techniques. The planning process of the PRINCE2 has structured approach leads to comprehensive steps and plans are produced keeping in view the dependencies of the activities. On the other hand, the PMBOK concentrates on the network diagrams, critical path management, conditional diagramming methods, etc. for developing plans to execute the project successfully. PRINCE2 follows ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches for project and stage plans respectively. However, the tools adopted by the PMBOK for time and cost management are comprehensively described by utilizing the Programme Analysis and Review Technique (PERT), Cost of Quality (COQ) analysis, etc. As far as the scheduling is concerned, the PMP provides two techniques for tackling the project under abnormal condition (when the project is behind schedule) and these techniques include: the project crashing and fast-tracking. Whereas, the PRINCE2 by utilizing the product-based planning provides unambiguous and clear roles and responsibilities for each team member involved in the execution of the project. The stage plan utilizes best practices for planning even the minute level of activities including the work packages of a product. Keeping in view the strengths and weaknesses it can be stated that the product-based technique of planning of PRINCE2 is far better than the other project management techniques (Sunohara, n.d). Reference List Beuhring, S., 2011. PRINCE2 Plan. [online] Available at: [Accessed 12 April 2013] Gardiner, P. D., 2005. Project Management – A Strategic Planning Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp 244 – 283 Hinde, D. 2012. PRINCE2 Study Guide. John Wiley and Sons, Incorporation Mathis, M., 2011. Work Breakdown Structure: Purpose, Process and Pitfalls. [online] Available at: [Accessed 25 November 2012] PMI. 2013. Project Management Institute Certifications. [online] Available at [Accessed 9th April 2013] Sunohara, D., n.d. PRINCE2 vs PMBOK: Comparing Apples and Oranges. [online] Available at: [Accessed 15th April 2013] Trainer, A., 2010. What is Product Breakdown Structure? [online] Available at: [Accessed 10th April 2012] Weese, S., 2010. Successfully Juggling the PRINCE2 Themes. [online] Available at [Accessed 9th April 2013] Read More