Plan

Here you can find a simple Plan template in Microsoft Word/Excel format, along with explanation on how to use it.

Background

“Plan” can be a Project Plan, a Stage Plan, or a Team Plan. They have the same structure.

In general, you need to explain the objectives (6 variables), give reference to Product Descriptions, explain how you’re going to monitor and control in the scope of the plan, what lessons you’ve considered when creating the plan, and… and the schedule!

According to PRINCE2, your schedule can have different formats, but in practice, a common schedule in a predictive project (one that is not adaptive/Agile) is a Gantt Chart with a table containing start and finish date of each activity, its cost, and probably resources. But feel free to use anything else, as long as it can make the “schedule” clear.

Composition

The template has these main sections:

Document information: this is the generic information about the document and connections with your Configuration Management system. Feel free to add more information here, but it’s best to keep it simple.
Approval: this section is for capturing approvals. There are multiple lines, because you may have multiple versions of this document approved. If you have a well-formed Configuration Management system to track approvals, feel free to remove this section.
Objectives: the six variables, with their target value and tolerance; e.g. this stage is two months, with a tolerance of two weeks. Do you know the exact meaning of PRINCE2 tolerances? They are different from the day-to-day use of the word “tolerance”.
Products: which products are going to be developed based on this plan? Give reference to their Product Descriptions.
Monitoring and Controlling: you need to have a “management approach” for monitoring and controlling. My preference is to create a separate “Monitoring and Controlling Approach” document for that, because it’s the same for most plans, and then only add extra information or adjustments here if needed.
Prerequisites, assumptions, and external dependencies: all of these can cause surprises in the future, so it’s best to document them here and remember them during the work of the plan. Schedule: as mentioned above, this is what I find the most normal and common way, but feel free to express your schedule in other ways.
Lessons incorporated: surprisingly, lessons are captured to be used ;) So, mention any lessons that you’ve considered when preparing this plan. This is mainly here to remind us to use the lessons learned.

eLearning Courses

If you’d like to learn everything about PRINCE2, I can suggest our eLearning courses:

The first few lessons in each course are free. You can start taking the courses right now and make sure it’s what you’ve been looking for before you buy.

Note: The first 30% of the courses used to be free, but because of the recent constraints from PeopleCert, we’re not allowed to offer more than 15% of the scope or more than 90 minutes of the duration for free.