The organisation component is one of the 8 components covered in all PRINCE2 training courses offered by Knowledge Train.
The Project Manager can take decisions day by day without referring them to the Project Board unless the plan is forecast to deviate beyond agreed boundaries (known as ‘tolerances’). Such a forecast of deviation is known as an ‘exception’ and this must be referred upwards to the Project Board for a decision to be made.
The Project Manager is responsible for making sure all the required products are built to the required quality within the constraints of cost and time. This is done by scheduling work to people with the necessary skills to design and build the products for the project. The Project Manager reports to the Executive and normally comes from the customer organisation.
Depending upon the size of the project, whether work is performed in different geographical locations, or whether the work is of a highly specialised or technical nature, the Project Manager might need to rely upon one or more Team Managers who shall each manage a team of people responsible for designing and building the products for the project.
PRINCE2 also defines what is known as Project Assurance roles, and each Project Board role has specific Project Assurance responsibilities. Project Assurance simply means the monitoring of the project's performance and products independently of the Project Manager. Each Project Board role may delegate their own responsibilities for Project Assurance to one or more other people. Project Assurance by its very nature cannot be delegated to the Project Manager.
Some examples of Project Assurance responsibilities include monitoring project finance on behalf of the customer (Executive Assurance), checking that users' specifications are complete, accurate and unambiguous (User Assurance) and checking that quality control procedures are being used correctly to ensure that products adhere to requirements (Supplier Assurance).
Sometimes Project Managers can rely upon support from secretarial, administration and accounting staff. These support functions are referred to as Project Support. Many times Project Managers must do without support since it is usually only larger organisations that can provide it. There is one particular Project Support role defined in the PRINCE2 method (the Configuration Librarian) whose responsibility is to look after the Configuration Management for the project which we shall talk more about later on.
In summary then, all the roles described here (except for Corporate/Programme Management) form part of a PRINCE2 project management team structure. The Project Board take the high level decisions about the project whilst allowing the Project Manager to perform the day to day management providing the plan remains within tolerance. This is known as ‘management by exception’. The Project Board is designed to reflect the interests of the customer (business), the user and supplier.
On some projects, Team Managers may manage groups of people who shall design and build the products, but this could also be done by the Project Manager. Team Managers report and take direction from the Project Manager.
PRINCE2 suggests that the responsibilities of all members of the project management team should be backed up by agreed job descriptions so that it is clear what is expected of each role on the project.
This article was taken from the booklet Concise PRINCE2™ (PRINCE2 ™ is a Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce) which was offered to students as part of the PRINCE2 training course (version 2005) by Knowledge Train. This booklet has been based on OGC (PRINCE2™) material. Reproduced under licence from OGC.
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