I attended a three-day QA Prince 2 Foundation course.
Including myself, there were nine delegates. Of course, being a project management course, there was an interesting skills mix: generally, though, everybody had some sort of IT background.
The lecturer was excellent and made good use of humour throughout. I don’t know how he managed it, but he used to “B” word (questioning parentage) frequently, but never just for the sake of it: each time resulted in nine heads nodding followed by laughter.
Interestingly, whilst I’ve not found this in the Prince 2 manual, Prince 2 believes that the best way to mess up a project is to allow the users to change requirements. Now, those of you who know me will know that I have been attending Agile Scotland meetings since February 2003… the agile modus operandi revolves around allowing users the opportunity to change requirements. I could see a quandary coming on…
During his introduction to Prince 2, the lecturer mentioned that an earlier version of Prince was seen as being bureaucratic and overcooked. “You must do this…” was a common phrase. Luckily, Prince 2 moves away from this approach, allowing the tailoring of Prince 2 to specific organisations and projects. After all, there’s little point spending £50K managing a £10K project…
Prince 2 is mainly commonsense, however how often do we get time to apply commonsense? Interestingly, the Prince 2 manual takes 400 pages to describe its flavour commonsense.
On the plus side, Prince 2 does expect us to get the customer involved and to get the user involved. This was seen as a good thing as it reduced any “moment of truth” surprises that might crop up during project/product delivery. I picked up another useful acronym, OSIHNTOT: “Oh s**t I had not thought of that.” (Aw-shin-tot)
Here’s a screenshot of the Prince 2 process model:
I think that goes some way to proving why Scrum works…
Technorati Tags: Prince, Prince 2, Scrum, Why Scrum Works, common sense
Very interesting to get a delegates perspective on P2 Foundation. One of the big differences between Agile and Prince 2 of course is the sort of thing that they are suitable for. Agile is often much better for software development for instance and Prince2 much better for bricks and mortar projects where requirements are much less flexible. For instance in game development it would be quite alright to decide to make a bridge out of plastercine half way through and anyone involved in the project might have suggested it. In Prince2 there are checks and balances in place to stop that sort of thing happening.