PRINCE2 2009 - Directing Projects with PRINCE2 part 8
of the Cabinet Office under delegated authority from the Controller of HMSO.
Project Board duties and behaviours
Provide unified direction
Project Board members must provide unified direction.
Unified direction is about teamwork at Project Board level.
While each Project Board member has accountability for satisfying the interests of a particular stakeholder category, it is crucial that a cohesive overall direction for the project is agreed and communicated.
Clearly, this can involve difficult compromises.
As far as possible, Project Board members need to defer to each other’s areas of accountability and work to achieve mutually agreed solutions.
Frequently, the best solution to a problem cannot be determined by objective evaluation: it is simply the one that Project Board members can agree on.
Users may favour a project approach or solution that suppliers consider inappropriate - perhaps because it is incompatible with an established strategy/standard, or is expensive to support.
Project Board members need to resolve such issues (focusing on the likely impact on business benefits) and communicate the outcome in a way that minimizes any potential for friction.
In an internal IT project for an international company based in New York, the Senior Supplier was perceived as having more influence in the company than the non-IT project Executive.
The Senior Supplier was a long-serving senior manager with a lot of experience and a network of contacts, whereas the project Executive was a relatively young member of the team, recently appointed as manager of the overall programme.
The Executive and the Senior Supplier differed over aspects of the international IT strategy agreed for the overall programme.
The Senior Supplier had sufficient business influence to be able to resist its implementation on the project concerned, which was at the core of the programme.
The disagreement at Project Board level caused uncertainty and delays in the project work.
Irrespective of the rights and wrongs in the debate about strategy, the problem was that decision making was disrupted and decisions were evaded because of internal politics, which the project Executive was not sufficiently senior to resolve.
Eventually, corporate management became impatient with the lack of momentum and the result was that the entire Project Board and the senior programme management team were replaced.
In the example below, lack of unified direction was clearly a factor in delaying the project - exacerbated, in that case, by the Executive not having sufficient authority to make a final decision.
What is clear is that where unified direction breaks down, and Project Board members communicate perceptibly different agendas, the effect is very rapidly translated into reduced overall project momentum and/or conflicting activity at the project team level.
Unified direction applies whether the customer/supplier relationship is internal to the organization or a commercial relationship.
All references above are in Directing Successful Projects with PRINCE2® unless stated otherwise.
PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.
Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 - 2005 edition
Managing successful Projects with PRINCE2 – 2009 edition
Directing Projects with PRINCE2.
plus:
The Complete Project Management package.
And much more besides - at a fantastic price.