Project Management Interview Prep: Concepts & Practice

Prince II structures four elements—principles, themes, processes, and tailoring—centered on seven principles and themes, with project managers creating plans and monitoring timescales, cost, quality, scope, benefits, and risk.

Starting up a project and initiating the project plan establish the business case, initiation stage plan, and outputs such as risk, quality, configuration, and communication management for delivery stages.

Identify the seven PRINCE2 principles, from continued business justification to tailor to the project environment, and learn how each principle acts as a core value guiding good project practice.

Ensure every project has a continued business justification with a clear business case, detailing costs, benefits, and ROI. Regularly review the business case and stop projects when ROI falls.

Learn from experience by actively uncovering and applying lessons from previous and similar projects throughout the project life cycle, and ensure everyone seeks lessons learned.

Define roles and responsibilities and ensure the business sponsors, users, and suppliers are correctly represented in the project management team and board, clarifying expectations and decision makers.

Break large projects into management stages to plan, monitor, and control work, using decision points from the project board and a two-stage process, including initiation and closing.

Master the management by exception principle by defining tolerances for time, cost, scope, quality, risk, and benefits, and escalate only when an issue falls outside these limits.

Focus on product principle emphasizes writing a clear product description that defines purpose, composition, quality criteria, and methods, guiding delivery, resource planning, dependencies, and stakeholder alignment.

Tailor Prince2 to the project environment by aligning the project controls with size, complexity, importance, capability, and risk, and describe this tailoring in the initiation documentation.

Explore the five project themes—business case, organization, plans, quality, and risks—and learn how to set up, monitor, maintain, and tailor activities at the start of a project through its lifecycle.

Explore how processes guide the chronological flow of a project and how themes like business case, plans, and risks are applied across the project lifecycle.

Define the business case to explain why we undertake the project and its benefits, with an executive-led outline business case linked to the project mandate, project brief, and initiation document.

Outlines the organization theme and the customer-supplier environment by clarifying who sponsors, who represents users and suppliers, the roles and responsibilities, the project manager, rules of engagement, and stakeholder communication.

Define and verify the required quality level for each product, documenting it in product descriptions and the quality management strategy to guide standards, responsibilities, and checks throughout the project.

Define a project plan as a document that shows how, when, and by whom targets will be achieved, including cost, quality, timescales, and benefits, with project, stage, and team levels.

Identify and analyze risks within a project, documenting threats and opportunities and monitoring them throughout lifecycle. Learn how risk management strategy document guides techniques, planning, and responses to reduce risk.

Learn how to identify, assess, and control changes through robust change and configuration management, obtain early approvals, and track products and changes with tools like SharePoint.

Monitor project progress by writing stage reports that compare actual movements to the original plan, forecast viability, and control deviations to decide whether to continue.

Explore PRINCE2’s seven process-based activities that transform inputs into outputs: starting up a project, initiating a process, directing a project, controlling estates, delivering products, managing stage boundary, closing a project.

Start up a project process, a pre-project phase shared by the project manager and executive, to confirm viability with an outline business case and plan initiation activities.

Define the project product, quality, timeline, costs, risks, and resource commitments through initiating a project process, and assemble the project initiation documentation and the business case.

Direct the project process empowers the project board to authorize stages, manage by exception, and delegate day-to-day project work to the project manager for delivering project success.

Control a stage process focuses the project manager on monitoring work, taking corrective action, and reporting to stakeholders within tolerance. It safeguards delivery by managing risk, issues, and quality.

Master the managing product delivery process by the team manager coordinating work packages, ensuring they are agreed and authorized, and delivering completed and tested work packages to the project manager.

This lecture outlines the managing a stage boundary process, with its two main functions, reporting the current stage’s performance and planning the next stage, for review by the project board.

Close a project by confirming acceptance of the project products, archiving documentation, and delivering end project and lessons learned reports, with project board approval and a smooth handover to operations.

Identify the output of the closing a project process as the basis for the project board's closure confirmation; the project board delivers closure, not the project manager.

Explore the processes timeline across the project lifecycle, from pre project processes and mandate to initiation, project board authorization, control, and closure, including risk, quality, and benefits review.