Lesson 02: Principles 2 and 3

In this lesson, we discuss the ‘Learn from Experience’ and ‘Defined Roles and Responsibilities’ principles.

Based on AXELOS PRINCE2^® material. Reproduced under licence from AXELOS. All rights reserved.
Note: PRINCE2 2017 edition is now called PRINCE2 6th edition.

00:07 – So we’ve moved on to the second principle, which is Learn from Experience.
00:11 – The scenario is still the banking mobile application that we’re trying to create.
00:17 – So, as this project is very different for the bank because this is the first time they’ve done something like this, the Project Manager encourages stakeholders that there was little benefit in seeking lessons from previous projects.
00:29 – Are they correct in saying that? The Project Manager? Is he correct in saying that?
00:34 – Well, we can learn more from similar projects, but there are always things that are the same in all projects. For example, the things related to human resources or to the way you managed risks, for example.
00:53 – Identifying that certain risks in the project can be different, but the process, that can have a lot in common now in different types of projects.
01:02 – So there are still a lot of things we can learn from unrelated projects.
01:06 – Correct. Actually every part of the project will be very similar to every other project except the technology part, you know, so even how testing will be done will be similar to other projects or can be similar, you know, and the ____, of course, the writing could be similar to maybe other projects as well, just one specific part is going to be different.
01:25 – So we always learn from other projects.
01:28 – Alright, the next question then. The Project Manager believes it is only important to use this principle, Learn from Experience, at the beginning of a project because that’s where it’s most applicable.
01:39 – Is that a correct way for them to think?
01:41 – In the beginning of the project, we try to identify some other projects that we can learn from, projects that we’ve done before, which is very helpful, but when we go on doing the project, we will face new things, and sometimes we see that we don’t know enough about them, so maybe you will just call one of your old friends who’s a Project Manager in that type of project, you’ll have lunch together and ask them about their experience in the project.
02:06 – That’s lessons learned and you will take notes and add it to the Lessons Log. Yeah.
02:10 – That’s another thing that can happen during the project and besides that all, you’re also generating your own lessons.
02:16 – Yes. Yeah.
02:17 – Which is very important to document, and we do it during the project.
02:21 – We don’t wait until the end of the project. Many people do it.
02:23 – That’s not useful because at the end, you will forget many of them.
02:29 – That’s too boring to sit down at the end of the project and try to remember what happened and create lessons. That’s not the way it works.
02:36 – Yes, that’s correct. So we apply this principle at the very beginning of the project, at the end of every stage and even at the end of the project, where we pass along lessons to a future project, so make them available for future projects as well.
02:52 – Also, during the stages, not only at the end of the stages.
02:56 – Yes, okay, but we summarize it at the end of the stage, that’s what I meant. Yes, yeah.
03:01 – Yeah. We’re always looking for lessons, yeah. And create a report, make it more useful.
03:05 – Yeah, good. Now, let’s say that a Project Manager was running a project and they want to add a credit card payment gateway to their online catalog, software application that they have. So, therefore, this project is very unique.
03:20 – Now, due to this uniqueness, the Project Manager invites an e-commerce specialist, so an external e-commerce specialist, to the first project product description workshop.
03:32 – Is that appropriate behaviour for the Project Manager to do? And why not?
03:38 – Why not? Exactly. Yeah, that’s always a good idea.
03:45 – I’m anchoring you in the wrong direction for the question.
03:48 – No, it’s a really good idea and it also relates to the principle of Learning from Experience.
03:53 – Yeah, because we don’t always have knowledge in-house and it’s up to us to gather some budget somewhere to invite people who have that knowledge because we don’t want to make the same mistakes that they already know of.
04:04 – We know someone that has that knowledge, we should be making use of them.
04:09 – Yeah. My other favorite is the one that I mentioned before.
04:12 – You just call one of your old friends who is a Project Manager, have lunch together or drinks together and share experiences. Yeah.
04:19 – I was once So you have a budget for lunch then?
04:23 – You’re meeting a friend, Frank.
04:26 – Okay. Alright, but you can have a longer lunch and get more questions if you have a budget for a bigger lunch, you know.
04:32 – Okay. You can charge the company for that.
04:35 – Of course, that’s how it is, you know. Yeah, it’s a business lunch.
04:38 – Actually, I was helping a company and I realized that in that company, they have multiple departments, multiple sections, and each section has its own projects with its own IT department, and their own Project Managers, separate Project Managers, and they are never in touch with each other.
05:01 – So, I talked to all the leads in those sections and convinced them to have monthly meetings for those Project Managers, to go out together, have fun, and share some experiences.
05:14 – After all, they’re all working in the same company.
05:17 – That’s really an expensive source of learning from experience and also team building." And was it adopted? This idea?
05:27 – For three months. Yeah.
05:30 – For the fourth month, they got busy with something else, they didn’t do it, and then I wasn’t working there anymore, so there was no one to push them.
05:39 – Yeah. It has to be driven by someone from up, otherwise, they forget it.
05:42 – Yeah. It needs someone to champion it.
05:45 – Okay. Alright. I’ve got one more question on Learn from Experience, I think. Okay.
05:49 – So, again on the scenario of the banking mobile app, the Project Manager makes it very clear to the Team Managers that because this is so specialized, that they are the only ones that should provide lessons for the project.
06:02 – Is that correct for the Project Manager to say so?
06:06 – Everyone can provide lessons. Yeah.
06:09 – In the Project Board, they have their own point of view to the project, their own type of lessons that they learn.
06:18 – The Project Manager and Project Support have their own type of lessons learned.
06:23 – The Team Managers have, the team members inside each team, they can also create.
06:27 – Also, even from other stakeholders who are in touch with the project.
06:33 – Yeah. Sorry, go on.
06:35 – If you can create the type of relationship to bring them in and make them involved and let them help you, that one of the helps that they can make is to provide you with lessons learned, the other is to help you identify risks.
06:47 – There are many, many things you can do.
06:49 – Yeah. In the wording of PRINCE2, it’s up to everyone involved in the project to look for lessons rather than just waiting around for one or two people, but get everyone to bring the lessons. Yeah.
07:00 – It’s the responsibility of everybody.
07:02 – Okay, so that’s two principles now. Now, the third principle, which is Defined Roles and Responsibilities. This is about people.
07:10 – So this, again, this principle actually has a nice introduction from the manual, as I quote from the manual.
07:18 – So, “Nothing will help the project if the wrong people are involved or if the right people are not involved.” That’s nice, isn’t it?
07:25 – Is it new? I don’t remember it. Yeah, it’s in the manual.
07:28 – I don’t remember reading it before, but it’s very, very good. Yeah.
07:32 – So, if you have the wrong people in it, doesn’t matter what you do, the project is going to fail.
07:37 – Or you have excluded somebody who can really make a difference to make this thing happen, then the project is going to fail. So, that’s a very, very good outline.
07:45 – Okay. So my first question for you then is …
07:48 – But before that, may I add something to that? No. Okay. No, go on.
07:52 – Alright, so what I always think is that most managers are just focused on bringing in capable people for the project. Yeah.
08:05 – You bring someone who’s a real expert in risk management, someone who’s really expert in scheduling, someone who’s expert in something else and also for the technical aspects.
08:15 – You bring all the experts and then just leave them there and expect to have a successful project, but you have to do many things here to enable those people to achieve something in the project.
08:29 – One of them, for example, is to motivate them.
08:31 – The other thing is to have team building, which I keep saying all the time, team building, team building.
08:37 – The other thing is to create clear roles and responsibilities, and that’s the principle we have here.
08:43 – To let people know what is expected from them and what they can expect from others.
08:48 – Yeah, that’s key, yeah.
08:50 – Okay, so how does a PRINCE2 project organization differ from line management organization?
08:58 – That’s the normal way of working, from operations way of working.
09:01 – How is it different? How does it differ?
09:05 – Well, it’s cross-functional but in departments, we are focused usually on one type of expertise.
09:12 – Okay. What does that mean? Cross-functional.
09:15 – You have different expertise involved.
09:17 – Different people from different departments that come together for the period of the project? Yeah.
09:21 – Okay, alright, good. And what rules are there?
09:25 – You know, when a Project Manager is trying to get resources and lock them into the project and and the line manager might grab them back, you know.
09:32 – Yeah. One problem is that in most companies, not all of them, but in most of them, people working in the project also have a line manager there, two different managers, which makes things more difficult.
09:43 – And probably two or three different projects at one time as well.
09:46 – Yes. That one is really terrible.
09:49 – That’s where the Project Manager should be depending on the Senior Users to ensure those resources are there.
09:55 – The Project Manager should not be arguing to hold on to people, I mean fighting directly with the people.
10:01 – It should go directly to the Senior User and down.
10:03 – Or even more importantly, the Senior Supplier because … That’s what I mean, both, yeah, the Senior User and the Senior Supplier. Yeah.
10:09 – You also need to have user representatives in the project to help us with user acceptance testing, but the suppliers taking on people, that’s the biggest problem." Yeah, yeah, it should go directly to them if there’s an issue, either side. Yeah.
10:22 – Yeah, good. Our next question then, my next question.
10:26 – The project has a Senior User and an Executive, okay, in the Project Board.
10:33 – Now they decide that they don’t need a Senior Supplier as the Project Manager has good experience of the technology.
10:42 – Is that appropriate? I would say no. Why?
10:46 – We don’t have to have a separate Senior Supplier role, a person, but we still have that concept in the Project Board and someone should satisfy that role in the Project Board and that person should be part of the Project Board.
11:01 – So maybe you would say that the Executive knows enough about the way we supply, we work.
11:07 – In that case, the Executive will also satisfy that role, for example, and that can be fine in certain situations, but we cannot expect the Project Manager to do it because the Project Manager is in another layer and I think it’s not a good idea for the same person to work in two different layers.
11:25 – Yeah, there’ll be conflicts of interest there as well, yeah, we can’t have that happen, and also in every project, we must have proper representation of the business user and supplier, so if we start missing that supplier, then we probably won’t have that because there’s no way the Project Manager can correctly do that job, you know.
11:43 – Yeah. So that’s not a good idea.
11:45 – And, as well, we just discussed in the last question where the Project Manager is depending on somebody with higher authority to make people available for the project and, of course, they won’t have that authority in the company.
11:56 – So they need that extra person there as well.
11:58 – Yeah, many people may think that it’s too easy what we expect from Senior Suppliers, it’s not so important.
12:04 – Anyone can do that, but it’s not like that. No, you’re right. Yeah.
12:09 – Now our third question on Defined Roles and Responsibilities.
12:12 – What would happen if there was not adequate user representation in a Project Board?
12:18 – How would the project differ if that kind of thing happened?
12:23 – We want the project to serve the end users, have the type of features and qualities that end users expect in order to realize the benefits of the project, and if we don’t have real user representatives, it becomes really difficult.
12:44 – We sometimes have certain expectations and beliefs about the way those people work, which is not correct.
12:52 – It’s always safer if we bring some of them here to the project and say, “Okay, what do you think about it? Is it the way you work really?
12:59 – Is it something that can help you in your work?” That can be great. That can be very helpful.
13:05 – Yeah. I think that, yeah, because then if we don’t have that, the requirements will be led by the provider, you know, and they will be saying they want this, they want this, they want this and they put in lots of features and they deliver a fantastic product, but it’ll also be unusable.
13:20 – Yeah. Or business people. The provider or the business people.
13:25 – The business people may also not have enough understanding. Yeah. Information, yeah.
13:30 – Well, we don’t have this separation in PRINCE2 really, but in DSM, for example, we have user type, business type, management type and, I’m sometimes thinking that way.
13:39 – That’s very helpful actually. In PRINCE2 we have supplier, user and business.
13:47 – Oh, we still have … sorry, yeah. Three, yeah. We have the three of them So, I think the most important thing there is that we will deliver products that will not be used if we don’t have proper user representation.
13:58 – There’s still cost, but we’ll never realize the benefits. So that’s not a good idea.
14:03 – Now, what would happen if we didn’t have adequate Senior Supplier representation on the Project Board?
14:09 – Things may not be realistic. What do you mean?
14:13 – Well, we may think of a really cool feature for the project, but don’t understand how difficult and, as a result, how expensive it would be to have it developed, or if we have enough resources to do it properly in time.
14:28 – Yes, yeah. So our idea of time when the product can be available will be not correct and our expectations of what the product will do will not be correct.
14:38 – So if we’re expecting something in our department and we don’t have this feedback, we’re going to be unsatisfied by what we get, you know, so therefore we’re going to say, well, this application is unusable.
14:49 – So it’s important to have this information back while we’re discussing the requirements, yeah.
14:55 – All these people should be working together.
14:57 – Yeah. Good. Okay, and now we’re going to move on to the principle, the one with the stages, it’s called Manage by Stages.
15:02 – So what is a Management Stage?
15:08 – Can we have a coffee before that?
15:11 – Did we discussed two stages already? I think so.
15:14 – Or two principles? Yes. Okay, then we can have coffee.
15:16 – Learn from Lessons and Roles and Responsibilities.
15:20 – Alright, back in a moment, don’t go away.

Next, we will discuss the “Manage by Stages” and “Manage by Exception” principles.

Scenarios/questions we’ve discussed in this lesson

Learn from Experience
- Is this principle useful if projects are very different?
- Is the Learn from Experience principle only important at the start of a project?
Defined roles and responsibilities
- Should outside experts be invited to the PPD workshop if needed?
- Are team managers (technical experts) the only ones to provide lessons?
- How does the organization of a project differ from day-to-day line management?
- A project has a senior user and an executive and decides they don’t need a senior supplier as the PM has good technology experience. Is this appropriate?
- What would happen if there was not adequate user representation on the project board?
- What would happen if there was not adequate supplier representation on the project board?

Lesson 02: Principles 2 and 3

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