PRINCE2 Agile
On the 23rd Oct 2014 by Jackie Hewett
“Watch this space”- there’s a new qualification emerging from the AXELOS Best Practice stable! ‘PRINCE2 Agile’ is imminent, currently estimated for release end Qtr1 2015. PRINCE2 Practitioner will be a pre-requisite to obtaining the qualification and, as it’s still in development, the specific details of how PRINCE2 Agile will be tested are unclear.

For the un-initiated:
PRINCE2 is about managing projects in a controlled way. Even the term PRINCE2 itself stands for ‘PRojects In Controlled Environments’. It’s about top-down management and tight control, especially of any proposed changes to project scope / requirements. PRINCE2 entails having a clear understanding of the project business case, comprehensive project documentation with detailed, signed-off requirements, clearly defined accountability and responsibilities and high level decision making. PRINCE2 is not industry specific and can be used to direct and manage a project of any size or complexity. ‘Die hard’ PRINCE2 practitioners, especially those who have managed very large scale projects, tend to be highly suspicious of agile methods, believing it puts ‘developers in charge’ and does away with project management controls, making the project impossible to plan or cost. In fact what is the role of a project manager on an agile project and perhaps Agile should only be applied to small, low risk projects?

AGILE is a term used (in the IT Industry) to describe a broad collection of different methods / approaches, such as ‘Kanban’ and ‘Scrum’. It came about to try to improve the ability of IT projects to respond to, even welcome, changing requirements. Agile methods advocate self organising, empowered teams who develop software in frequent, short time-boxed iterations with only high level requirements agreed up front and lower level requirements