Managing Successful Projects - Prince2

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Prince2 can best be described as the “big daddy” of project management processes and here it is in all its 450 page gory detail! This book is the official text for the methodology and is needed if you are considering taking the two accompanying Prince2 examinations; the Foundation or the Practitioner.

Prince2 is basically a management best practise. It gives you a detailed process that one should go through to deliver a project, starting off with collating information and appointing relevant people to make the decision whether you want to go ahead, then on to how to plan a successful project, how to control the build phase and finally what you need to do to successfully close the project. There are a whole range of templates for likely management documents such as issue logs, risk logs and project initiation information.

What I think is a great shame with Prince2 is that so many people buy this book simply to get the qualification, spend several weeks reading it, maybe attend a Prince2 examination course and then leave it on a shelf for ever more. There are some excellent project management concepts within Prince2, which, if applied correctly, can help many projects deliver more successfully.

The strength of Prince2 - its amazing detail (basically a complete detailed guide on a how to create the perfect project) - is also its weakness. It is so detailed that without going on the course it is impossible to understand all its intricacies and even then several weeks after attending the class, much of it is usually forgotten.

However this is not to say that it is not worth taking the time to understand it. The best approach to using this method is to gain an overview of the key concepts that the detail is trying to implement, such as always having a project business case, and then implement these concepts as best as you can in your organisation. To do this you can do a course, read some of the excellent overview books of Prince2 such as Colin Bentley’s “Prince2 Revealed” or call Orgtopia as we have implemented Prince2 in a number of organisations through our consultancy.