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PRINCE2 is a generic, globally recognised, structured project management method based on experience gained in thousands of projects undertaken in many organizations throughout the world.

It is underpinned by the concept of involving all who will be affected by, or can affect the project and deals with managing the project to a successful conclusion; that is its strength.  It doesn’t prescribe how the work should be done, it gives guidance on what needs to be done and why it should be done this way.

Many think that PRINCE2 is either a stand alone method or part of a suite of methods.  Well both views are, to an extent, correct - let me explain.

Put simply, PRINCE2 is the ‘best practice’ project management method.  It is published by the stationery office (TSO) on behalf of the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and is part of a portfolio of ‘best practice’ guidance produced by the OGC which are offered to help organizations and individuals manage their business change initiatives.

The other products cover programme management (Managing Successful Programmes - MSP™), risk management (Management of Risk – M_o_R®), corporate support functions (Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices – P3O®), Portfolio Management ), review process (Gateway®) and service management (ITIL®).  Further models to assess organizational capacity to deliver business change (maturity models) are also published by the UK Office of Government Commerce:  PRINCE2™ Maturity Model (P2MM) and Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3™).

Figure 1 below is a diagram of the structure of the ‘best practice’ portfolio of products.

So, you can start out in life with PRINCE2 and use it as a stand alone for managing your projects.  As the size of the organization changes you may find a need to take on more of the products, so start to utilise Managing Successful Programmes and Management of Risk.

Likewise you can use PRINCE2 in conjunction with other methodologies for the actual work such as SCRUM and Lean.  I will talk more about this in future posts.

In conclusion, PRINCE2 can be utilised as a stand alone, part of portfolio of best practice products or in conjunction with another methodology.  So the initial statement was true - it is both.

Hopefully that gives you a flavour of PRINCE2 in context to other products and we can move onto the next question of why we need project management, then we will return to the other methods.