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Plan

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A PRINCE2 plan provides an overview of how and when objectives are to be achieved during a certain time in a project. A plan will show the products (scope) that will be delivered, perhaps the activities and resources required. In PRINCE2, there are three levels of plan:

Team Plans are optional, and the Team Manager can use any format they like to create their own plan. The PRINCE2 Project Manager should be mainly concerned that the products pass their quality tests so product are fit for use.

A Project Plan provides the Business Case with an estimate of planned costs of the project, and it identifies the management stages and other major control points that will be used. The Project Plan is used by the Project Board as a baseline against which to monitor project Progress , so the Project Board can be asking “how are we doing compared to the original project plan?”

Stage Plans outline the products to be delivered, the required resources, sometimes the activities if required. The Stage Plans should also incldue the specific controls that will be used to show progress and and allow the level above the monitor progress against a baseline.

Team Plans (if used as they are optional) could comprise just a schedule appended to the Work Package(s) assigned to the Team Manager .

PRINCE2 says that a plan should cover not just the activities to create products but can also the activities to manage product creation - including activities for assurance, quality management, risk management, configuration management, communication and any other project controls required. Defining the activities to create the products may be OK for predictive projects where it easy to define the majority of the activities up front but this is not the case in al projects. In fact, defining the activities in detail upfront can give a false sense of security that all will be perfect :-)

Sample Initiation Stage Plan

Initiation Stage Plan sample

Sample Project Plan

Project Plan Part 1 Sample

Project Plan Part 2 Sample

Sample Stage Plan

Stage Plan sample

Stage Plan Schedule Sample

Timeline Plans

PRINCE2 Management Products

Source data for Plans

Format of a Plan

Quality Criteria for a Plan

Some tips from Frank

discussion icon PRINCE2 wiki is open-source and published for free under a Creative Commons license.

discussion icon Written by Frank Turley (his LinkedIn profile)