How PRINCE2 practices work

This course is an independent study of three of the seven PRINCE2 practices: business case, organizing and plans. PRINCE2® is a registered trademark of PeopleCert. Every explanation, example and question here is original; none of it reproduces the official manual or real exam questions. When you sit a PRINCE2 exam, the official PRINCE2 7 manual is the authority, and in the Practitioner exam it is the only book you may consult.

PRIN-110 studied the seven principles, the beliefs that make a project a PRINCE2 project. PRIN-120 studied people and the project context. This course turns to the practices: the aspects of project management that must be addressed continually and in parallel throughout a project. Where the principles say what must be true, the practices describe how a project makes them true. Three practices answer three basic questions that any sponsor asks before committing money and people: why are we doing this (business case), who is doing what (organizing) and how, when and for how much will it be done (plans).

What a practice is

PRINCE2 7 describes seven practices: business case, organizing, plans, quality, risk, issues and progress. Earlier editions called these themes; the seventh edition renamed them practices to emphasize that they are things people do, not topics to read about. Each practice is described in a consistent way: its purpose, how it relates to the principles, guidance for effective use, the management products that support it, the techniques that help, and how it is tailored for different situations.

The three practices in this course are tightly linked. The business case cannot be written without estimates of cost and time, which come from plans. Plans cannot be approved without someone with the authority to approve them, which the organizing practice establishes. And the organization cannot decide whether to continue without a business case that is updated as plans change. In practice, the three develop together during starting up and initiating a project, and they are refreshed at every stage boundary.

Practices, principles and processes

The principles, practices and processes are designed to work together. Principles are the non-negotiable beliefs. Practices are the aspects of management that run throughout the project. Processes are the step-by-step journey from start to finish, and each process draws on several practices. For example, the initiating a project process uses the business case practice to refine the business case, the organizing practice to confirm the project management team, and the plans practice to produce the project plan. PRIN-140 and PRIN-141 study the processes in detail.

An important consequence is that a practice is not a phase. The business case is not written once and filed. It is created in outline before the project starts, detailed during initiation, updated at every stage boundary and used after the project to confirm benefits. The same is true of plans and of the project's organization. Thinking of practices as threads that run through the whole timeline, rather than as boxes on a schedule, is one of the most useful habits a PRINCE2 student can develop.

Management products

Each practice is supported by management products. These are not the specialist products the project exists to create, such as a new building or a software system. They are the documents and records the project uses to manage itself: plans, registers, reports and approaches. PRINCE2 deliberately keeps the number of management products modest and allows them to be combined, held in tools rather than documents, or simplified for small projects.

Students sometimes memorize the products without understanding why they exist. A better approach is to ask, for each product, what decision it supports and who uses it. A business case supports the decision to invest and to continue investing; the executive owns it. A stage plan supports the decision to authorize a stage; the project board approves it. A product description supports the decision to accept a product; the people named as reviewers and approvers use it. If you know the decision, you can usually work out the contents.

Minimum requirements and tailoring

PRINCE2 describes what must be done for each practice, as a minimum, for a project to be following the method. Beyond the minimum, it offers guidance that may be adopted, adapted or omitted. This distinction is central to tailoring, which PRIN-110 discussed as a principle and PRIN-150 covers in depth. Tailoring does not mean skipping the business case on a small project; it means keeping the business case to the length and formality the project needs.

Running example: Ridgeline Water

To keep the examples connected, most lessons in this course follow one invented organization. Ridgeline Water is a mid-sized municipal water utility serving about 60,000 customer connections. Its meters are read manually every quarter, estimated bills are common, and leaks on the customer side often go unnoticed for months. The utility's board is considering a project to replace manual meters with smart meters that report readings automatically. The figures used are illustrative and simplified; they are chosen to make the arithmetic clear rather than to describe any real utility.

Over the coming lessons we will build Ridgeline Water's business case, appraise options, define its benefits, set up its project management team and produce its plans. By the end, you will have seen how the three practices fit together in one project, and the capstone will ask you to do the same for a different case.

Checking that a practice is working

Because practices run throughout the project, it is useful to have simple checks that show whether each one is alive or merely documented. The code below represents three practices as lists of yes-or-no checks and reports which ones are healthy. The checks are a teaching device, not an official PRINCE2 list.

checks = {
    "business case": {
        "options compared, including do nothing": True,
        "reviewed at last stage boundary": False,
        "benefits have owners and measures": True,
    },
    "organizing": {
        "executive named and available": True,
        "assurance independent of project manager": True,
        "change authority defined": False,
    },
    "plans": {
        "plans built from products": True,
        "estimates show basis and range": False,
        "tolerances recorded in stage plan": True,
    },
}
for practice, items in checks.items():
    met = sum(items.values())
    status = "healthy" if met == len(items) else "needs attention"
    print(f"{practice:14} {met}/{len(items)}  {status}")
    for name, ok in items.items():
        if not ok:
            print(f"{'':16}- missing: {name}")

business case  2/3  needs attention
                - missing: reviewed at last stage boundary
organizing     2/3  needs attention
                - missing: change authority defined
plans          2/3  needs attention
                - missing: estimates show basis and range

Two of the three practices show a gap. The business case has not been reviewed at the last stage boundary, which undermines the principle of continued business justification. The plans have estimates without a stated basis or range, which makes tolerances hard to set. Neither gap is unusual; both are the kind of thing an assurance review would pick up.

How this course is organized

Lessons 2 to 4 cover the business case practice, including investment appraisal and benefits management. Lessons 5 and 6 cover the organizing practice. Lessons 7 to 10 cover the plans practice, including product-based planning and how plans connect to stages and tolerances. Lesson 11 practises exam technique for these practices, and lesson 12 is a capstone that brings them together. FIN-201 covers investment appraisal in more depth for readers who want the finance background, and CON-210 covers critical path scheduling in construction.