Planning a PRINCE2 Project In A Day For Dummies Book

Introduction 1

What You Can Do In A Day 2

Foolish Assumptions 2

Icons Used in This Book 2

Chapter 1: So What’s a Project Method and Why Do I Need to Use One? 5

Getting the Lowdown on PRINCE2 6

Giving You Some Facts about Projects 7

Fact 1: A lot of projects go wrong 7

Fact 2: We know why projects go wrong 8

Fact 3: We know good ways of preventing a lot of those things 10

Fact 4: PRINCE2 is free to use 11

Making Your Life Easier with PRINCE2 11

Clearing Up Some Misunder-standings about PRINCE2 13

Chapter 2: Project Initiation and the PID 15

Getting to Grips with Initiating a Project 16

Understanding Why You Need Plans 17

Looking at What’s in the PID 19

Getting Strategic 20

Thinking about risk management 20

Thinking about quality management 22

Thinking about Change and Configuration Management 27

Thinking about communications 29

Deciding on Controls 34

Breaking the project into blocks 34

Setting up the other controls 35

Planning Your Project 37

Working on the Business Case 38

Building the full Business Case 38

Planning the measurement of benefits 39

Preparing for the First Delivery Stage 40

Fitting PRINCE2 to the Project 40

Writing the Extra Bits of the PID 40

Putting the PID Together 42

Looking at How You Use the PID 43

Asking the Project Board to commit to the whole project 43

Chapter 3: Planning the Project, and the First Delivery Stage 47

Thinking about the Planning 48

Considering organisational requirements 49

Thinking about money 49

Planning with Products 50

Looking at the planning problem 51

Focusing first on what you must produce 51

Identifying products in the project 52

Using the Product Flow Diagram 54

Writing Product Descriptions 57

Defining the project 62

Giving the product list some structure 62

Moving On to Activity Planning 66

Estimating – the Easy Bit 67

Scheduling and Resourcing 68

Activity networking and precedence networks 69

Activities with Gantt charts 74

Activities and resource levelling 74

Checking Risk 75

Explaining the Plan 77

Adding explanations for those who read the plan 77

Financial planning 78

Planning at Three Levels 78

The Project Plan 78

The Stage Plan 79

Chapter 4: Where to Go from Here 81

Finding out about training 81

Visiting dummies.com 82