Capstone: a principles health check of a troubled project

This capstone brings the course together. You will carry out a principles health check of a fictional troubled project, score the evidence for each principle, identify the most urgent gaps, connect them to the symptoms the project is experiencing and recommend actions. The method is the same one you would use as an assurance reviewer, an incoming project manager or a Practitioner exam candidate analyzing a scenario. Work through each step before reading the model answer.

The project: Riverbend Fare Card

Riverbend Regional Transit, a public transit agency serving three municipalities, launched a project 14 months ago to replace paper tickets with a contactless fare card and mobile app. The approved budget was 8.5 million dollars over 18 months, funded partly by a state grant that requires the system to be live before a fixed date. You have been asked by the agency's chief executive to review the project against the PRINCE2 principles, which the agency adopted as its standard two years ago.

Your interviews and document review find the following:

• The business case was approved at the start and has not been updated. Since then, a neighboring agency has offered to share its fare system, which might cost far less, but this option has not been assessed.
• The project manager found a lessons report from a previous ticketing upgrade warning about integration with the legacy accounting system. It is filed in the project folder but no action was taken. Integration is now the main source of delay.
• The project board consists of the chief operating officer as executive, the IT director, the head of finance, the vendor's account manager and three municipal representatives. The board has met four times in 14 months. Nobody represents frontline customer service staff or riders.
• The project plan was a single stage after initiation, covering all 18 months. There have been no stage boundary reviews.
• No tolerances were set. The vendor has reported a forecast overrun of 1.3 million dollars and four months, which the project manager has been "working to recover" for three months without telling the board.
• Requirements are a 200-line spreadsheet of features with no acceptance criteria. Testers and the vendor disagree about whether several features are complete.
• The agency's PRINCE2-based method requires full documentation for all projects over 1 million dollars. The project manager produced every template at initiation, but most have not been touched since.

Step 1: score the evidence

Use the 0 to 3 evidence scale from Lesson 1: 0 means no evidence, 1 means named but not practiced, 2 means practiced inconsistently and 3 means practiced consistently.

Step 2: connect symptoms to principles

Scores alone do not tell the chief executive what to do. The next step links the project's visible problems to the principles that would have prevented them.

Step 3: assess the current position

Before recommending actions, the reviewer needs an honest forecast. The agency's finance team confirms that 5.9 million has been spent.

Step 4: recommend actions

Good recommendations are specific, prioritized and tied to principles. They should restore control first, then fix the foundations.

Observe that the first two actions restore the board's ability to decide. The overrun cannot be fixed by the project manager alone, and the business case question cannot be answered without the board. Everything else improves the project's chances once a decision has been made.

Step 5: report the findings

A health check report for a senior audience should be short. A useful structure is: purpose and scope; overall assessment with the score and a one-line verdict; the three to five most important findings, each linked to a principle and a consequence; recommendations with owners and dates; and an appendix with the detailed evidence. Avoid blame. The aim is to restore control and give the project its best chance, not to criticize individuals. Many of Riverbend's problems came from an organization that required paperwork but did not require decisions.

What the capstone teaches

Troubled projects rarely fail because of one bad decision. They drift because several principles weaken at once and nobody notices until the symptoms are serious. A principles health check makes the drift visible. It can be used at any time, not only in a crisis: at initiation to check that the foundations are in place, at stage boundaries as part of assurance, and at closure as part of learning from experience. The seven principles give a compact, shared language for asking whether a project is being managed well.

Running your own health check

You can apply the same method to any project you know: one you work on, one you have read about, or a case study. Gather evidence from three sources: documents (business case, plans, registers, reports), decisions (board minutes, approvals, exception records) and behavior (how people talk about problems, who decides, whether reports are read). Score each principle from 0 to 3, link the weakest scores to visible symptoms, and draft three to five prioritized recommendations. Keep the report to two pages plus an evidence appendix. Practicing on several projects builds the pattern recognition that both Practitioner exam questions and real assurance work demand.

The capstone also shows that the principles are diagnostic as well as prescriptive. They tell you how to set up a project, but they are equally useful for finding out why a project is struggling. When something goes wrong, asking which principle has weakened is often the fastest route to the real cause and to a fix that lasts.