What is PrinceLite?
PrinceLite is a process that integrates the software engineering process with the project governance process. PrinceLite (PL) is a project delivery methodology. It is too common that well managed projects, fail to deliver anything meaningful. For that reason PL stresses delivery over a narrow definition of management.
If you have already made an investment in Prince2™ (P2) - do not worry, many of the concepts are carried over and refined. If you report to management that want to know why P2 is not sufficient, the answer is that PL is defined specifically to allow you to deliver I.T. projects. It is of no use for construction or civil engineering.
The key benefits of PrinceLite are:
- it addresses cultural and political challenges introducing 'Project Contemplation' as an essential part of the method.
- it integrates the business team and development team through the common language of requirements
- senior management sign-off on prototypes (normally), because people don't read long documents
- only artefacts (products/documents) that add demonstrateable value are produced.
- the basis of all artefacts is pictorial therefore artefacts are short but highly accurate
- method that stresses the possibility of early lifecycle requirements that can be used as part of a rigorous effort estimation programme
- write accurate business requirements specifications that can be used in procurement (tenders, ITT, RFP) to solicit fixed price quotations instead of time and materials estimates
- it is straightforward; although complex (lots of simple elements) it is not complicated therefore it is understandable to a business audience. As an end-to-end approach it delivers unambiguous specifications to architects, designers, programmers and testers.
The downloads include a well-formed worked example of an unambiguous business requirements specification genericised from an actual assignment plus much more.
- A worked example of a genericised business requirements specification with accompanying notes.
- A discussion of Prince2 in an agile world.
- An analysis of moving from Prince2 to PrinceLite in order to leverage your existing investment.
- A discussion on the true role of governance.
- An investigation into the true nature of business change and barriers to achieving it in a project and programme sense.
- An analysis of a project that went badly wrong.
- An investigation into the object-oriented nature of UML use cases as a formalism for the representation of business requirements.
Press
Lite Relief for Project Delivery – Computing Feb 2008
The Business Can’t Abdicate its Responsibility – Computer Weekly March 2008
The Difficulties of Agile Development - Information Age August 2008
Read a report from the 2nd DSDM Consortium Agile conference held at the Excel Centre in London, September 2008. Topics include: Agile project management: does it exist outside of I.T.? How important are requirements capture in an Agile project? Also a report on an interview with Peter Morowski from Borland who have transformed the company into an Agile shop.
PRINCE2™ is a trademark of the Office of Government Commerce
* incidental note: artefact can be spelled with either an 'e' or an 'i' (artifact).
** the word artefact/artifact can be understood in a P2 context as 'product'.
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