If the exam went ok I should shortly be a ‘PRINCE2 registered practitioner’. The problem is that at first sight there is a total mismatch between the top-down approach of Prince2 and the Agile approaches Ruby is at home with.

“The core value of an egalitarian meritocracy runs deep in the agile movement”, according to one of the founders of the Agile Movement1. PRINCE2, on the other hand, is all about control. Not only that, but even a quick glance at PRINCE2 diagrams shows its origins in the heyday of Waterfall methods.

If the two approaches really are incompatible then Ruby and Rails (not to mention almost all software development that has emerged from the free software movement) would be increasingly ruled out of all government projects. Not only is the OGC fully behind PRINCE2, but there is definitely a viral aspect to PRINCE2 once it has a foothold in an organisation.

Searching around for attempts to reconcile the two doesn’t return much. DSDM seems to be the only formal method around, and that is heavily proprietary - it seems that to read about it I have to sign away the possibility of commenting on it, so I won’t.

The alternative is to start from first principles. PRINCE2 is always very clear that it can be combined with other methods:

“PRINCE2 does not cover all aspects of project management. Certain aspects of project management (such as leadership and people management skills, detailed coverage of project management tools and techniques) are well covered by other existing and proven methods and are therefore excluded from PRINCE2.”

So can PRINCE2 and a specific Agile method just be merged? Julian Harris has produced a spreadsheet of one set of potential mappings between each of the PRINCE2 stages and its closest equivalent in Scrum. Authorising a Work Package, for example, is mapped to the start of a new Sprint.

In the process of mapping, it’s noticeable that the fine detail of the PRINCE2 stages is being forced into a few much coarser-grained Scrum categories. The role of the Executive almost vanishes; the separation between Customer and User goes; and the Ad-Hoc Direction stage is removed. In other words, the compromise between top-down control and ‘egalitarian meritocracy’ is achieved by simply removing the controls. This is not likely to be acceptable to organisations already using PRINCE2.

So could we instead slot an agile approach into an overall Prince2 framework? The obvious thing to do would be to use agility within the Managing Project Delivery substages. PRINCE2 is fairly quiet about the MP stage - it doesn’t matter too much how it works, as long as it gets done and any problems are reported on quickly. Following Julian’s approach, the Scrum Master would now become the Team Leader rather than the Project Manager. Some aspects fit fine: for example, the use of Test Driven Design could be specified in the Work Package. The problem now is the reverse of Julian’s solution: a self-contained agile method within a single PRINCE2 stage has surrendered all the bottom-up initiative that allows it to work.

Issue Control seems to be the main problem from the PRINCE2 side. The intention is that tolerances (cost, timing, scope, quality etc) are set from above - and that anything which looks likely to exceed the tolerances needs reporting upwards for decisions as soon as it is noticed. Applied so strictly that it removes all initiative this would stifle any team, but it seems a particular problem for an agile team.

On the Agile side, one problem is access to users. PRINCE2 moves the user connection with the product up to the Senior User on the Project Board; agile methods need continuous interaction with the user during development.

Neither problem looks insurmountable if there is a will to make it work. Tolerances can be set loosely. Some decision making ability can be delegated downwards. Users can be involved in multiple levels of the project. None of this needs to mean giving up on the PRINCE2 principle of fixing the approach before work starts.

But in practice are the underlying philosophies just too different? I know that at one time Alasdair Mangham of Camden Council was musing a PRINCE2 approach to managing open source development based on experience with APLAWs - did it ever happen? Is anyone in the UK actually trying to merge these approaches? I’d love to know…

  1. Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management p.9 [↩]