PRINCE2 Implementation Case Study
PRINCE2 Implementation Case Study
Implementing PRINCE2
A case study for the PRINCE2® Foundation and Practitioner course.
Disclaimer
AXELOS® is a [registered] trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS
Limited. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction .........................................................................................................................................3
1.1. Search Service Provider ................................................................................................................3
1.2. Organization Structure ..................................................................................................................3
2. Background..........................................................................................................................................4
2.1. Current Business Process .............................................................................................................4
2.2. Problem Statement ........................................................................................................................4
2.3. Solution .............................................................................................................................................5
3. PRINCE2 Implementation .................................................................................................................6
3.1. Tailoring Considerations ...............................................................................................................6
3.1.1. Role Assignments ...................................................................................................................6
3.1.2. Principles ..................................................................................................................................6
3.1.3. Themes .....................................................................................................................................6
3.1.4. Processes..................................................................................................................................7
3.1.5. Terminology .............................................................................................................................7
3.1.6. Tools and Techniques ............................................................................................................7
3.2. Pre-Project Phase ...........................................................................................................................8
3.2.1. Starting Up a Project Process ..............................................................................................8
3.2.2. Directing a Project After Starting Up a Project Process ...............................................11
3.3. Planning Phase – Initiation Stage (Management Stage 1 in the Project) .........................12
3.3.1. Initiating a Project Process (Initiation Stage) ..................................................................12
3.3.2. Managing Stage Boundary After Initiating a Project Process .....................................19
3.3.3. Directing a Project After Initiating a Project Process ....................................................21
3.4. Project Execution Phase – Management Stage 2 ..................................................................22
3.4.1. Controlling a Stage ...............................................................................................................22
3.4.2. Managing Product Delivery ................................................................................................28
3.4.3. Directing a Project During Project Execution Phase .....................................................29
3.4.4. Managing Stage Boundary towards the end of a Management Stage .....................31
3.4.5. Next Steps ..............................................................................................................................33
3.5. Project Closure Phase..................................................................................................................35
3.5.1. Closing a Project ...................................................................................................................35
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4. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................................41
4.1. Conclusion Remarks ....................................................................................................................41
5. References .........................................................................................................................................42
5.1. References .....................................................................................................................................42
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1. Introduction
The customer has approximately 890 employees working across the country from 9
regional offices in various cities and several area offices in various towns. Marketing
department team members will call the shops and establishments to get their consent
to meet Field Sales team members. The field sales team members visit given shops and
establishments and collect details such as services offered, contact numbers, hours of
operation etc. on a day-to-day basis.
Chief Executive
Officer
Company
VP - Marketing VP - Sales VP - IT VP - Operations
Secretary
Network and
Field Sales team Database
Team Leads Infrastructure Team Members Team Members
members Administrators
Team
Development
Team Members
Team
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2. Background
On a monthly basis, Field Sales team members will collate their expenses and submit a
printed form with relevant attachments. Field Sales team members will get this
approved by their respective Area Managers first. The Office Administrator will collect
all the expense reimbursement forms, do an initial verification of expense claimed
versus bills submitted and courier them together to their respective regional office.
At the regional offices, Regional Managers will review the received expense
reimbursement forms and then process them. After that, the forms are sent to Head
office for final review and approval. The payouts to respective Field Sales team
members happen in subsequent payroll cycle.
Customer has laid policies for approval of reimbursement of these expenses. The
following table illustrates the expenses reimbursement policy.
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A few Field Sales team members have started leaving the organization due to delay in
getting their expenses reimbursed. It is estimated that about 12% of Field Sales team
members have left the organization.
A lot of negative articles have started appearing on social media and job search sites –
discouraging potential new employees from joining the organization.
2.3. Solution
Chief Executive Officer took note of the situation and asked the VP – Sales to come up
with a solution. VP – Sales discussed with VP – IT and came up with the idea of digitizing
the expense reimbursement forms and doing away with paper-based forms. VP – IT
suggested that the IT team will be able to do this digitization internally.
Chief Executive Officer agreed to this solution and stressed the need for ensuring that
company’s money is not wasted as the IT Team may take this as a learning opportunity
at company’s expense. Chief Executive Officer also insisted on following the well-
established 3 level governance meetings and reviews.
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3. PRINCE2 Implementation
3.1.2. Principles
• Principles can’t be tailored. All 7 Principles are applicable as they are.
3.1.3. Themes
• For this small project, the Project Manager proposed to follow the minimum
management products required for each theme as mandatorily to be
created and maintained.
• Other management products that may be used in the Project are arrived at
during Initiating a Project process.
• The management products required for each theme are as follows:
o Business Case
▪ Business Case
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▪ Benefits Management Approach
o Organization
▪ Project Initiation Documentation
▪ Communications Management Approach
o Quality
▪ Quality Management Approach
▪ Quality Register
o Plans
▪ Project Product Description
▪ Product Description
▪ Product Breakdown Structure
▪ Project Plan and Stage Plan
o Risk
▪ Risk Management Approach
▪ Risk Register
o Change
▪ Issue Register
▪ Change Control Approach
o Progress
▪ Lessons Report
3.1.4. Processes
• All processes will be followed as they are.
3.1.5. Terminology
• Project Brief will be renamed as Project Feasibility Study.
• Project Support will be termed as Project Administration.
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3.2. Pre-Project Phase
3.2.1.5. Select the Project Approach and Assemble the Project Brief
• Project Approach answers these critical questions on how the work of the
project is going to be approached:
o Will the solution be developed in-house or contracted to a third
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party?
o Will the solution be a modification to an existing product or built
from scratch?
o Will the solution be based on a commercial off-the-shelf product
(often referred to as a COTS) or something that is custom-designed?
o What delivery approaches should be used? Will the delivery
approach use agile working methods (for Software projects)?
• For this project:
o The IT team is going to develop the software, and no commercial
off-the-shelf (COTS) software will be used
o Delivery approach will be non-agile (this project doesn’t need an
iterative approach as the scope of the project is mostly known and
fixed. Agile approach is most suitable when scope is volatile, i.e.,
scope keeps on changing during the project)
• While preparing the Project Approach, the Project Management team
evaluates the possible delivery solutions and decides upon the project
approach appropriate to delivering the project product and achieving the
outline business case.
• Project Brief is assembled by
o Defining the project, i.e., confirming the status of the project –
background and any preparatory work carried out so far
o Confirming the objectives and desired outcomes
o Confirming ‘in scope’ and ‘out of scope’ deliverables
o Identifying constraints and assumptions
o Identifying project-level tolerances on cost, timelines, quality, scope,
benefits and risk (the six project objectives that must be monitored
and controlled)
o Carrying out stakeholder identification and identifying impacted
users
o Embedding Outline Business Case (i.e., a link to Outline Business
Case)
o Embedding the Project Product Description (which contains Project-
level scope and quality expectations)
o Embedding the Project Approach
• For this project:
o Project Brief is termed Project Feasibility Study.
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3.2.2. Directing a Project After Starting Up a Project Process
Please note, in this case study, activities in Directing a Project are not shown together.
They are shown as they happen during PRINCE2® Project process flow.
For this reason, Directing a Project process will be presented multiple times with
relevant activities.
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Figure 3.2.2-1 Next steps from Authorize Initiation activity in Directing a Project process
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Figure 3.3.1-1 Next Steps from Initiating a Project process
Please note, in this case study, activities in Managing Stage Boundary are not shown
together. They are shown as they happen during PRINCE2® Project process flow.
For this reason, Managing Stage Boundary process will be presented
multiple times with relevant activities.
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3.3.3. Directing a Project After Initiating a Project Process
Please note, in this case study, activities in Directing a Project are not shown together.
They are shown as they happen during PRINCE2® Project process flow.
For this reason, Directing a Project process will be presented multiple times with
relevant activities.
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o If the Project Board doesn’t authorise the project, Project Manager
must close the project prematurely
o This is shown diagrammatically
Figure 3.3.3-1 Next steps from Authorise Project activity in Directing a Project process
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▪ obtaining the relevant product descriptions, i.e. scope for
inclusion in the work package
▪ defining the techniques and processes and procedures to be
used such as code review, source control tools, procedure for
moving code from Development to Quality and to Production
environments
▪ defining the development interfaces to be maintained
▪ defining the operational and maintenance interfaces to be
maintained such as post project support interfaces
▪ defining the change control requirements such as how to
raise issues, how to prioritize them and how Request for
Changes will be assessed
▪ defining the approval method for the Work Package such as
how to obtain sign off for completed deliverables
o Project Manager will review Work Packages with relevant Team
Managers to ensure that they accept that and authorize them to
begin work and review their Team Plans
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(please see Produce an Exception Plan in Managing Stage
Boundary for more details)
▪ After reviewing this Exception Plan, Project Board under
Corporate or Programme Management guidance (because of
Project level exception) felt that this requirement can be
rejected at this point of time as the effort and cost involved
exceed allowable Project level tolerances (also see Authorize
a Stage or Exception Plan in Directing a Project process during
Project execution)
▪ This was conveyed to Project Manager, and Project Manager
updated the Issue Register accordingly
o Issue 3: Off-specification
▪ During testing, a Regional Manager found that the email
request triggered by the system for an approval is not
displayed properly in Microsoft Outlook software
▪ The Regional Manager raised this as an issue
▪ Project Manager reviewed the Product Description’s
acceptance criteria and found that it was agreed with Team
that the approval email format should support HTML and it
should work with any email client software
▪ Project Manager tagged this issue as Off-specification (as it
was agreed but not delivered)
▪ Project Manager informed the Regional Manager who raised
this issue that this is a defect and will be fixed by the team
▪ Project Manager composed an issue report and informed the
team to fix the issue
▪ Project Manager also created a corresponding Quality
Activity to test this defect (also see Corrective Action in next
section)
▪ When the team fixed the issue, the reviewer assigned to this
role tested the defect and found it to be fixed
▪ Project Manager updated the Quality Register and Issue
Register accordingly
Please note, in this case study, activities in Directing a Project are not shown together.
They are shown as they happen during PRINCE2® Project process flow.
For this reason, Directing a Project process will be presented multiple times with
relevant activities.
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▪ VP – IT insisted that SSO must be enabled for expense
reimbursement application; otherwise they would fail in ISO
27001 certification audit
▪ Project Board reviewed the situation and gave ad hoc
direction to Project Manager to treat this as a Request for
Change and sanctioned cost from Change Budget
Please note, in this case study, activities in Managing Stage Boundary are not shown
together. They are shown as they happen during PRINCE2® Project process flow.
For this reason, Managing Stage Boundary process will be presented
multiple times with relevant activities.
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o As given in ad hoc direction example in Directing a Project process,
Project Manager will update Project Product Description to include
the extra product (i.e. enabling the Single-Sign On SSO) sanctioned
by the Project Board
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3.5. Project Closure Phase
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• Procurement of multifunction printers
o As per initial plan, two multifunction printers
were purchased for each office location
o Project Board advised the IT Manager (i.e.,
Project Manager) to retain one multifunction
printer, return the other one and claim a refund
from printer supplier
• Retain network port established at offices
• Keep the Single Sign-On Integration Work Package in a
safe repository to be used in future for other projects
when required
▪ Work Packages in-progress
• 3 level approval workflows should be abandoned.
Whatever work has been completed to date must be
deleted from company’s repository
• Integrating image storage on cloud – Project Board felt
it would be good to have this capability in the
development team. The board advised Project
Manager to come up with an Exception Plan that
captures the effort, cost and resources required to
complete the remaining work in the Work Package
▪ Work Packages yet to start
• Report generation – to be abandoned
• Integration with Payroll software for processing
expense reimbursement claims in payroll cycle – to be
abandoned
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4. Conclusion
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5. References
5.1. References
• Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2®, 2017 Edition © Axelos.com, all
rights reserved
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