PRINCE2 Software

PRINCE2 Software Definitions

PRINCE2 software - "the project management software and tools that support your successful delivery of projects to the PRINCE2 methodology".

PRINCE2™ - "a project management methodology which provides a best practice set of processes, components, techniques and products that should be used to deliver your project successfully".  Provided by OGC as a manual (hard copy book or PDF on CD), it in itself is not PRINCE2 software.

The PRINCE2 Software Challenge

The PRINCE2 software challenge is about providing individual project managers and organisations with tools which make it easier to take advantage of the benefits of PRINCE2 and remove its difficulties.  To be successful in this your PRINCE2 software must support you across your project management needs and also be easy to adopt and implement.  The single biggest cause of failure when implementing new management systems software is the rejection of new, complex tools by end users.

The following sections explore some key attributes of PRINCE2 software you should expect to find.

PRINCE2 software - establishes strong processes

Absolutely key to implementing PRINCE2 is the concept of the process.  Users need to understand that each activity is related to other activities and this needs to be communicated clearly to all users of your PRINCE2 software. 

PROJECT in a box PRINCE2 software achieves this by providing users with the authentic PRINCE2 process diagrams which they can simply navigate with point-and-click.  This feature makes it understandable for even PRINCE2 novices.  Once in a process the PROJECT in a box PRINCE2 software shows the user excatly which management products (documents) they should be working with at that point.

PRINCE2 software - supports scalability

At the heart of PRINCE2 is the concept of scalability - the methodology should be tailored to the needs of each individual project - and it is essential that your PRINCE2 software supports this.  Most form-based PRINCE2 software systems provide a rigid interpretation of PRINCE2 or at best can only provide one PRINCE2 style which is applied to all projects.  This virtually guarentees under or over-management of projects away from this norm. 

PROJECT in a box PRINCE2 software enables users to launch multiple varieties of PRINCE2 projects, each with different processes, products etc. (indeed any process-based project methods) and manage them all within the same system.  In addition, our PRINCE2 software enables users with sufficient permissions to alter a launched project on the fly, adding or removing documents and changing their status.

PRINCE2 software - easy to adopt

Because of its clearly defined process model and structure, PRINCE2 is frequently adopted by organisations wanting to build/implement a project culture.  Therefore PRINCE2 software needs to be as easy to use as possible for end users.  Project team members should have to learn the minimum of new tools to enable them to contribute effectively to the project and the PRINCE2 software should be easy to implement. 

PROJECT in a box PRINCE2 software provides the methodology structure and supporting project manager administration tools and enables the project team members to continue to work almost exclusively with the tools they are already familiar with such as MS Project, Word, Excel etc. 

When starting a new project users can launch each new activity from a template file provided in a familiar format, including headings and guidance on the information they might add.

When migrating an existing project into the PRINCE2 software, users simply add their existing project documents into the relevant locations and off they go!  This approach applies to PRINCE2 components and techniques too:  we provide risk, issue and quality logs as Excel tools that can be circulated to users who don't have a licence for the PRINCE2 software before being reloaded to the system for inclusion in the reporting.

PRINCE2 software - provides appropriate management oversight

PRINCE2 operates on the principle of management by exception:  the project manager delivers the project to agreed plan and tolerances and reports to the project board at defined intervals unless a deviation (exception) occurs.  Your PRINCE2 software should be able to support the PM and the project board in this model.  In reality many organisations find it difficult to let go of conventional periodic project reporting along business lines, so your PRINCE2 software should also support this oganisational need. 

PROJECT in a box PRINCE2 software uses a simple yet customisable permissions model to enable the project manager to provide access to different parts of the project and different capabilities for each member of the project team, project board and also suppliers, partners and other stakeholders.  This includes the ability to produce reports on the current status of the project as held in the PRINCE2 software including finances, risk, issue and quality status, stage and project status, commentaries etc.  Users with portfolio permissions can report aggregated and individually on these information sets across their portfolio of projects even if the projects are each of different varieties/methodologies.

PRINCE2 software - provides authentic advice and guidance

PRINCE2 is renowned for the opacity of the manual that many users rely upon when trying to implement the methodology.  PRINCE2 software should support users with advice and guidance to ensure authentic implementation.  Unfortunately many PRINCE2 software systems provide non-authentic guidance including redrafted advice using different terms and redrawn diagrams.  This frequently results in more confusion for the users.

PROJECT in a box PRINCE2 software makes extensive use of authentic material reproduced verbatim from the PRINCE2 manual under licence from OGC the owners of the methodology.  Key here is the P2 Guidance Module (P2GM) which gives you over 25,000 words of guidance from the manual, divided into 70 easy to digest topics, with over 500 interlinks and the full PRINCE2 glossary.  The P2GM is provided as a Microsoft help file making it very easy and familiar to use and enabling context-sensitive linking from wherever you are in the PRINCE2 software.

We hope you have found this guide to PRINCE2 software helpful and that it has provoked some thoughts about what you should be looking for when looking to specify and buy a solution.  Remember, make your PRINCE2 software work for you, don't buy some over-specified, over-constrained, form-based and rigid system because all its bells and whistles look impressive.  PRINCE2 software like this will be difficult and expensive to implement, your project team will recoil against it and it will be discredited and unused.


See the left hand panel for quick links to our market leading PRINCE2 software solutions.

Want to know more?  Try our combination training and software PRINCE2 solutions or the best in PRINCE2 articles at our knowledge centre. For a complete set of PRINCE2 resources try our excellent PRINCE2 Primer giving you the best of information sources on PRINCE2 available on the web.