The PRINCE2 process model

This course is an independent study of the first three PRINCE2 processes: starting up a project, directing a project and initiating a project. 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. Process and activity names follow common PRINCE2 7 usage as described in published study guides; when you sit a PRINCE2 exam, the official PRINCE2 7 manual is the authority, so confirm exact wording there. In the Practitioner exam it is the only book you may consult.

The earlier courses in this track built the toolkit. PRIN-110 and PRIN-120 covered the principles and the people side of projects. PRIN-130 and PRIN-131 covered the seven practices: business case, organizing, plans, quality, risk, issues and progress. The practices describe what must be managed throughout a project. The processes, which this course and PRIN-141 study, describe when and by whom. They turn the practices into a sequence of activities with owners, inputs, outputs and decision points. If the practices are the ingredients, the processes are the recipe.

Seven processes, one lifecycle

PRINCE2 has seven processes. Each one is a structured set of activities designed to achieve a specific objective, and each is owned by a particular level of management. Two of them, starting up and initiating, happen once at the beginning of a project. One, directing, runs from the end of starting up until the project closes. Three, controlling a stage, managing product delivery and managing a stage boundary, repeat for every delivery stage. The last, closing a project, happens once at the end, as part of the final stage.

Management levels and the processes

The process model sits on top of the four levels of management that PRIN-120 introduced. The business layer, which might be corporate management, a program or a customer organization, commissions the project and sets project-level tolerances. Directing is the project board's level. Managing is the project manager's level. Delivering is the level of team managers and their teams. Each process belongs mainly to one level, and the boundaries between levels are where authority is handed down and where exceptions are escalated back up.

Note that the executive and project manager work together in starting up before the project board formally exists. Starting up is technically a pre-project process: no project has yet been authorized, and it is the board's decision to authorize initiation, made in directing a project, that formally creates the project. This is one of the most frequently tested ideas in Foundation exams, because it explains why starting up should be short, cheap and focused on a single decision.

Stages and where the processes fall

PRIN-130 showed that a PRINCE2 project is divided into management stages, each ending with a board decision. Every project has at least two management stages: an initiation stage and one or more delivery stages. The final delivery stage also contains closing a project. Starting up is not a stage at all; it comes before the first stage. The processes line up with this structure as follows.

The initiation stage contains two managing processes. Initiating a project produces the project initiation documentation (PID). Managing a stage boundary, run towards the end of initiation, produces the stage plan for the first delivery stage and updates the business case and project plan. The board can then make one combined decision: authorize the project, and authorize the first delivery stage. This course covers the first part of that sequence in detail and points to PRIN-141 for the stage boundary work itself.

Ridgeline Water: the early timeline

This course follows Ridgeline Water, the invented municipal water utility from PRIN-130 and PRIN-131, from the day its smart-metering idea first appears to the moment the project board authorizes the project. PRIN-130 built its business case, team and plans; PRIN-131 controlled its pilot stage. Here we go back to the beginning to see how those artefacts were produced by the processes. The investment appraisal from PRIN-130 still applies: the smart-meter option costs 5,000 thousand in year 0 and 4,600 thousand in year 1 and returns a net 1,240 thousand a year from years 2 to 15, giving an NPV of about 2,309 thousand at 5 %. All figures are illustrative.

Planning the stage boundaries

The code below lays out Ridgeline Water's stages, as they will appear in the project plan produced during initiation, and calculates where each board decision falls. Starting up is shown before week 0 of the project because it is pre-project. The durations match PRIN-130's plan; the rollout stages are split so that each ends at a natural decision point, after a group of districts.

stages = [
    ("Starting up (pre-project)", 4, 0),
    ("1 Initiation", 8, 160),
    ("2 Pilot district", 29, 1450),
    ("3 Rollout: districts 2-8", 30, 3700),
    ("4 Rollout: districts 9-20 and closure", 33, 4290),
]
week = -stages[0][1]
total_cost = 0
print(f"{'Stage':38} {'Start':>5} {'End':>5} {'Cost $000':>9}")
for name, weeks, cost in stages:
    start, end = week, week + weeks
    total_cost += cost
    print(f"{name:38} {start:5d} {end:5d} {cost:9,}")
    week = end
print(f"Project duration from authorization of initiation: {week} weeks")
print(f"Project cost (stages 1-4): {total_cost:,} thousand")

Stage                                  Start   End Cost $000
Starting up (pre-project)                 -4     0         0
1 Initiation                               0     8       160
2 Pilot district                           8    37     1,450
3 Rollout: districts 2-8                  37    67     3,700
4 Rollout: districts 9-20 and closure     67   100     4,290
Project duration from authorization of initiation: 100 weeks
Project cost (stages 1-4): 9,600 thousand

The project runs for 100 weeks from the authorization of initiation, plus four weeks of starting up beforehand, and its stages add up to 9,600 thousand: the 5,000 and 4,600 thousand of capital cost in the business case. Each row ends at a board decision. The initiation stage is short and cheap compared with the delivery stages, which is exactly what PRINCE2 intends: the organization commits a small amount to find out whether the large amount is worth committing.

Processes are not phases

A common misunderstanding is to treat the seven processes as seven consecutive phases. They are not. Directing a project runs in parallel with everything from the end of starting up onwards. Controlling a stage and managing product delivery run in parallel within each delivery stage. Managing a stage boundary overlaps with the end of controlling a stage. And the processes describe management activity, not the specialist work of building meters or writing software, which follows its own technical lifecycle and may overlap stage boundaries.

A second misunderstanding is to think every activity in every process must be done in full. PRINCE2's principle of tailoring applies to processes as much as to practices. On a small project, starting up and initiating might be combined into a few days, the project brief and PID might be the same evolving document, and the board might make its decisions in a short meeting or by email. What cannot be dropped is the purpose of each process: a deliberate decision to invest in initiation, a deliberate decision to authorize the project, and a deliberate decision to close it.