PRINCE2 (Project Management Methodology)
An organization needs an effective project management for the perfectness in the nature and scale of the business.
For this, an organization can use an effective method of the project management such as Prince2. PRINCE2 stands for ‘projects in controlled environments’ that is a process-based method of project management for effectiveness.
The organizational project becomes more effective as well as usable for the expertise by the use of the Prince2 method.
It is because this method is helpful for a project manager to identify as well as assign roles to team members of the company.
The main purpose of the use of Prince2 project management methodology is to provide effectiveness in the project management.
It is helpful to guide the researcher by providing thoughts that what are the essentials of the successful and meaningful projects as well as an effective framework (Špundak, 2014).
In addition, this method also provides an effective project environment at global level companies for project management method.
The other objectives using this method are that it complete the project in the budget as well as mitigates the risks by timely with quality completing the project.
A project can be effectively framed by the use of the PRINCE2 method to deliver the project timely as well as in the assigned budget.
PRINCE2 is very helpful for a manager because it has defined lifecycle of the project and divides the project into clear stages like start, middle, and end.
Moreover, it is very effective due to focusing on the delivery of products as well as it also carrying out the activities (Wells, 2012).
Prince2 is also helpful to provide the pre-defined business project with providing the measurable business products.
A Prince2 project has a corresponding set of activities for effective and easily achieving the business products. It can also be said that it need only specified the number of resources to manage the project effectively.
A Prince2 project is also an organizational structure which includes several defined responsibilities for managing the project (Lianying et al., 2012).
Prince2 is based on the seven themes, seven principles and seven procedures that are given in the below table:
| S. No. | Seven Themes | Seven Principles | Seven Procedures |
| 1 | Business case | Continued Business Justification | Starting-up a Project |
| 2 | Organization | Learn from Experience | Initiating a Project |
| 3 | Quality | Defined Roles and Responsibilities | Directing a Project |
| 4 | Plans | Manage by stages | Controlling a Stage |
| 5 | Risk | Manage by Exception | Managing Product Delivery |
| 6 | Change | Focus on Products | Managing Stage Boundaries |
| 7 | Progress | Tailor to Suit the Project Environment | Closing a Project |
Suitable application and popularity
PRINCE2 is a project management technique which is most popular in the overall world and it is growing from the several years.
From the several years, it is identified that the project managers are using PRINCE2 as preferred project management qualifications for the continuous growth of the company at a worldwide level.
In addition, it can also be said that Prince2 is the most popular project management qualification in the overall world which have taken more than 1 million exams globally (Joslin and Müller, 2015).
The popularity of Prince2 is growing every year expect 1996 and 2009 due to the economic crisis. In the starting, it was released as generic project management method in 1996.
But after some years, Prince2 was growing popular and become successful and now it has a de facto standard for the project management.
It is acknowledged that after the success, the name of Prince2 was replaced with ‘Projects IN a Controlled Environment’ in the year 2009. The name of Prince2 was changed after the revision.
Prince2 was developed by the government of UK that is a highly preferred methodology for executing the government projects of UK (Marcelino-Sádaba et al., 2014).
But, in the last decade, it is seen that this project management methodology is also using in the private sector project.
The main reason for gaining this popularity by Prince2 is that it is absolutely free to use in the project management by any kind of organization.
It is also identified that it presents flexibility for the project and it is not a rigid method so it also becomes popular in the project management.
As per the project environment, it can be said that Prince2 provide an option to changes in the project during the implication but it depends on the size, requirement, an object of the project and organization (Ghosh et al., 2012).
The changes in the implementation show that Prince2 has flexibility for the project that helps to make it popular worldwide.
Behind the popularity of Prince2, it is recognized that it is a process-based method. In this process, the method provides different steps that require being followed by the project manager for the effective and efferent outcome of the project.
In the current situation, the use of Prince2 has been increased at the global level after the success in the UK (Tomanek et al., 2015).
Today, Prince2 has been established in the different counties both in public and private sectors like United States, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, South Africa, and Belgium.
There are seven areas in which Prince2 addresses the key project management issues like configuration management, organization, quality, risk, plans, changes, and process.
In concern to this, if the risk area is selected for addressing the key project management issues than it can be said that Prince2 is much helpful in the identification and resolution of the risk.
Prince2 is helpful for the project manager to determine several risks that can be arises during the project (Juricek, 2014).
After the identification analyzes the key areas that may affect this risk so it Prince2 helps to document it an effective manner.
In addition, there are many solutions are provided by this method to reduce the possibilities of occurrence of these risks.
Finally, it provides different modes to manage the risk as well as monitor throughout the project by this risk.
In the Startup, some risks of the project brief can be added to outline business case in brief. In this, the known risks are added to daily log for identifying their moment and then are transferred to the risk register in the initiation stage.
After this, all the risk of the project is gathered by the project managers from all the project stakeholders.
In this, a summary of key risks is added to the risk register so that it makes available on the project board.
In the boundary stage, the risk information can be updated to aware the project employees (Nicholas and Steyn, 2017).
Finally, in the controlling stage, the project manager provides instructions to mitigate the risk areas and known new risks by this implementation.
Both Prince2 and Agile are the project management methodologies which are recognized for international management framework. But both approaches have several differences that are as below:
- Prince2 examines both cost and benefits in each stage whereas Agile only estimates the cost and identifies the deliverables of the cost.
- Prince2 contains knowledge bank for handling the critical situations in an effective manner while the learning outcomes are not documented in the Agile by its team (Eskerod and Huemann, 2013).
- There are several methods and techniques are available in Prince2 for the risk management such as risk tolerance, risk profile diagram, etc. On the other hand, Agile only focuses on the technical risk for the on-going tasks.
- In Prince2, the risks are focused on each level whereas, in Agile, the risks are focused on the sprint level only for particular delivery.
- The outputs of Prince2 are measurable which provides out-weighed benefits while the main focus of Agile on the final product to provide its benefits.
- In Prince2, the proper period is not defined for any deliverable because it only depends on the scopes whereas, in Agile, the products are delivered in 3 weeks and the time-boxing concept is used for performs tasks (Svejvig and Andersen, 2015).
- There is a need for huge amount of time in Prince2 for planning and designing but in concern to Agile, there is no need of more time due to flexibility in planning and designing process.
| Strength | Weakness |
| Prince2– This approach is developed for different large and medium size projects.
It is also suitable for different kind natures of projects. |
Agile– It cannot be developed for large scope projects.
It is mainly used in the IT development projects. |
| Agile– There is a possibility that this concept can be used in another kind of project management methodology. It is because it has agility. | Prince2- It can only be a dominant methodology for a project. |
From the above study, it can be concluded that Prince2 is an approach to project management. It is most popular project management methodology that is using by the project managers at the international level.
In addition, the difference between Prince2 and Agile shows that prince is most popular for the large project and Agile can be used only for small level organizations.
Eskerod, P. and Huemann, M., 2013. Sustainable development and project stakeholder management: What standards say. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 6(1), pp.36-50.
Ghosh, S., Forrest, D., DiNetta, T., Wolfe, B. and Lambert, D.C., 2012. Enhance PMBOK® by comparing it with P2M, ICB, PRINCE2, APM and Scrum project management standards. PM World Today, 14(1), pp.1-77.
Joslin, R. and Müller, R., 2015. Relationships between a project management methodology and project success in different project governance contexts. International Journal of Project Management, 33(6), pp.1377-1392.
Juricek, J., 2014. Agile project management principles. Lecture Notes on Software Engineering, 2(2), p.172.
Lianying, Z., Jing, H. and Xinxing, Z., 2012. The project management maturity model and application based on PRINCE2. Procedia Engineering, 29, pp.3691-3697.
Marcelino-Sádaba, S., Pérez-Ezcurdia, A., Lazcano, A.M.E. and Villanueva, P., 2014. Project risk management methodology for small firms. International journal of project management, 32(2), pp.327-340.
Nicholas, J.M. and Steyn, H., 2017. Project management for engineering, business and technology. NY: Taylor & Francis.
Špundak, M., 2014. Mixed agile/traditional project management methodology–reality or illusion?. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 119, pp.939-948.
Svejvig, P. and Andersen, P., 2015. Rethinking project management: A structured literature review with a critical look at the brave new world. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), pp.278-290.
Tomanek, M., Cermak, R. and Smutny, Z., 2015. A conceptual framework for web development projects based on project management and agile development principles. arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.04297.
Wells, H., 2012. How effective are project management methodologies? An explorative evaluation of their benefits in practice. Project Management Journal, 43(6), pp.43-58.
