PRINCE2 Foundataion Project Management Course
On March 10-12, I attended a 3 day PRINCE2 foundation training class held at my company's site in Grenoble. This method originated from the UK government's purchasing office, today known as the OGC (Office of Government Commerce). It is most widely known in Britain, closely followed by Holland, Belgium, and now Germany, and France. It is less known in the US, where the PMI method has been introduced and promoted for a longer time.
It was very interesting to learn about this project management method, despite some reservations I have regarding how heavyweight it can be. The method has 8 different processes, each with several subprocesses, and many dozens of different types of documents that must be produced during the various project stages (what is commonly called a project phase elsewhere).
One point that seemed particularly useful was the formal requirement to have a written business case and to review it during each stage: if the business case can no longer be attained, then the project should naturally be stopped. This is useful not only to prevent maintaining a project indefinitely (zombie project that refuses to die!) but also to prevent "scope creep", the common tendancy to add additional project goals at each stage, thus preventing a clean finish of the project. This method maintains that it's better and natural for projects to finish, even if during the last stage future work is identified which could be the goal of a future project.
In addition to the official UK government link above, more information is available from this commercial web site. I'll also be maintaining an internal web page about PRINCE2, including the training classes, template documents and references to use cases.
