A lot of people, far too many people - including PRINCE2 Practitioners - think that PRINCE2 is some project documentation method and lose sight of the power of the method.  In fact many accredited PRINCE2 training companies add to the problem because they haven’t properly understood PRINCE either and actually teach it as a project documentation method.  This is both dangerous and costly.

 In one major UK charity, senior staff don’t want to know about PRINCE2.  One member of staff went to a training company which taught form filling and went back and created a huge pile of PRINCE2 paper.  Senior managers have been completely put off PRINCE2 and now say “Don’t talk to us about PRINCE2, it is just a big paper hungry machine.”  What a shame – they are missing out on what is actually a very powerful project management method that could help them enormously.

 But what about those reports then, because there are rather a lot of them.  There is an End Project Report, an End Stage Report (for each project stage) progress reports (Highlight and Checkpoint Reports), problem reports (Exception Report).  Well a lot of reports must mean a lot of paper.  Well actually, no, not necessarily.  There are a couple of things that can help here.

reporting - without making a paper mountain

The first is to take on board that the word ‘report’ was chosen very carefully and very deliberately by the planners of PRINCE2.  It is a Highlight “Report” not a Highlight “Document”; a report can be verbal.  There is a tendency in projects to write far too much down and it may be possible to have verbal reporting.  Smaller projects may achieve this, but also some larger ones.  If the Project Manager phones up the three members of the Project Board and lets them know what progress has been made in the last two weeks, that is a Highlight Report.

Now it is the Project Board’s choice about how they want Highlight reporting done.  In the Project Initiation Document there is a Communication Plan.  This could specify that particular information is phoned through to Project Board members as a Highlight Report.

simplifying reports

One organisation hit a problem with the End Stage Report.  Again a project manager had been on a ‘fill the forms in’ training course.  The problem was that the End Stage Report as defined by PRINCE2  has quite a lot of headings within it.  The Project Manager thought that they should put in at least a couple of good sized paragraphs under each heading to make the report worthwhile – only they couldn’t think what to write.  It ended up that they went to the end stage meeting without the report being done, and promised it to the Project Board in a couple of weeks.  Instead of objecting, the Project Board went along with that and approved the next stage.  But the couple of weeks turned into three, then four and still no End Stage Report because the Project Manager simply couldn’t think what to write.

There has been a change in the Project Management standard in that organisation now.  The End Stage Report only has a very few headings, one of which is “Project Manager’s Comments”.  The advice tells Project Manager to comment on anything important from the last stage and to consider things such as … and here it lists the old headings.

Don’t hesitate to change your organisational application of PRINCE2 if you can make it simpler.  It is in nobody’s interests to have unnecessarily complicated reporting.

written verbal reports

A good ‘half way house’ between verbal reports and written reports is written verbal reporting.  “How on earth” you ask “can you have a written verbal report?”  Well, easy!  The problem with a lot of written reports is that Project Managers think that they must be beautifully presented.  They write their report, then spend a day adjusting the font size, putting in some graphics, adjusting the wording and generally ‘prettying up’ the report.  The half way house is that the Project Manager just writes key figures down on a scrap of paper.  They then give a verbal report to the Project Board which is taken down in the notes of the meeting.  The Project Manager hands the bit of paper over to the person making the notes to be sure that the figures are correct.  With the meeting notes, you have a written record of  a verbal report.  There is a record, but it cuts out all that time consuming ‘prettying up’.

 finally

PRINCE is a powerful project planning and control methodology.  Don’t let it descend into a form filling ritual that slows the project down instead of securing it and powering it forward.  Remember, it takes time to produce documents, and it takes time for people to read them.  Be sure that you only use what you need, and then that those documents are as straightforward as possible.  Be careful that project administrators work to keep things simple, not to set up a paper mountain.  The objective is a delivered project, not standardised, tabulated documentation.

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simplify reports where you can.

that might mean combining headings if your needs are simple

a half-way house - written verbal reports :-)

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